FIRST CATCH YOUR CONDOR

In the hills surrounding the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, an extraordinary ritual takes place every July. Its star is a wild bird with an 8ft wing-span

The patriotism of the Peruvians knows few bounds. Independence Day - commemorating Peru's liberation from its Spanish rulers 175 years ago - is on 28 July, and the festivities are already beginning. People from all levels of society fling themselves into the celebrations with almost insane extravagance and enthusiasm.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the Yawar Fiesta ("festival of blood"), a four-day affair observed in the high Andean villages around Cuzco, former capital of the Incas. Like most such events, it is a glorious, chaotic orgy of costume, dance, burlesque and staggering quantities of alcohol and coca leaves. What makes it unique is its involuntary guest of honour: the condor.

The world's largest vulture, with a wingspan often exceeding 8ft, the condor was the sacred bird of the Incas, respectfully known as the "favourite chicken of the gods". Its treatment at the fiesta is not exactly respectful, but there is no doubting the reverence its captors feel for it.

Several days before the festivities begin, a shaman is contracted by the nominally Catholic villagers to capture a condor. (Bowing to modern protocol, a government permit is obtained first.) The shaman takes a band of men to the plains high above the tree-line, where they make sacrifices, asking the gods for permission to borrow the bird. Eventually, a horse - the animal that made the Spanish conquest possible - is garrotted, as if in retaliation, and laid out as bait. Before long, several condors will have landed to feast on the flesh. At last, groggy with food, they will stagger back towards the hills in search of air currents on which to launch themselves. It is a relatively easy task to rush after them and grab one.

The captured condor is borne back to the village, where its arrival sets off the fiesta proper. Everyone drinks beer, including - like it or not - the condor. Women sing in strident nasal tones; rag-tag bands play bleating, cacophonous music. Bull-horn trumpets, or waka waqras, bleat loudest. It is thought that the condor understands them.

Like mad carollers, the bands reel around town, parading the condor and demanding - and consuming - alcohol and coca leaves. There is much toasting from ceremonial cups, and much uninhibited drunkenness. In every street, shamans set up altars. It is bedlam, yet no one seems bothered by it.

Finally, the condor is led out to the focal point of the fiesta: the bull ring. The ancient Incan tradition of bullfighting is quite unlike the Spanish one - and much stranger. Somehow, the condor is lashed to the back of a bull, which is further goaded by having alcohol spat into its nostrils. The enraged beast then charges around the ring, the condor flapping its vast wings, to face the braver youths. Tradition and ritual demand that blood be shed: not the bull's, and certainly not the condor's, but human blood. It is rarely long in coming - a trampling here, a goring there - although fatalities are rare.

The ritual, like the fiesta as a whole, is a curious fusion of Peru's two traditions, European and Indian. To the mistis - shopkeepers and landowners of European extraction - the struggling animals represent a re-conquest parable, with the Andean bird riding the Spanish bull. For the darker- skinned peasants who toil for them - campesinos - such imagery is irrelevant. To them it is a fertility rite, in which blood must be spilt to placate Pacha Mama ("mother earth") and bring the rains. Independence did little for them, and the fact that its anniversary coincides with the ancient festival is coincidental. They interpret the bullfight through the tripartite Incan cosmology: the bird of the heavens is united with the bull, associated with the subterranean, to satisfy the middle level of Pacha Mama. None the less, the gulf between classes is bridged by the festival. The bands and shamans are all campesino, but the mistis are the only people wealthy enough to pay for all the food and drink. So each group needs the other.

The fiesta was in danger of dying out in the Eighties because of the Shining Path, a movement ostensibly launched to liberate campesinos from mistis. Its defeat has averted this threat to the fiesta, but may have replaced it with another: prosperity. There is now electricity in the area, and tourism. Old horses are no longer set loose to become condor fodder and there are fewer of the great birds. But there remain enough to sustain a ritual which, despite its 19th- and 20th-century trappings, still offers a haunting link with the pre-Columbian Incan past.

On the final day of the festival, the condor is released from a clifftop. Last year, I watched her float across the valley to another cliff-face, from which another condor emerged to join her. It was a good omen; and, as countless generations of ancestors must have done before them, the crowd buzzed with a murmur of jubilation. !

Opposite page, above: the newly captured condor is serenaded by a waka waqra, or bull-horn trumpet. Locals believe that the condor understands this music

Opposite page, below: the bird is paraded in the street

This page: before the cross above one of the villages near Cuzco. The fiesta's curious juxtaposition of Incan and Christian values emphasises the divisions in Peruvian society as a whole

Left: inebriated campesinos, or Indian peasants, in mid-celebration. The four-day fiesta is marked by spectacular drunkenness

Above: the condor is not allowed to escape the drinking. This one preferred beer to the traditional homebrewed chicha

Near right: strapped to the back of a fighting bull, the condor is whirled around the bull ring. Neither creature is injured in the 'fighting'

Centre right: peasants attempt to play the traditional waka waqra. The horns are notoriously difficult to play, especially after four days of non-stop drinking

Above: the condor surveys the bull ring before its ordeal

Left: after four days of ritual and revelry, the bird is released back into the Andean skies