Salinas de Guaranda: A Nowtopian Town in Ecuador | Nowtopian
From Guaranda we rode in the back of a Camioneta to Salinas de Guaranda, a little over an hour further into the brilliant crypto peerless green mountains of the Ecuadorian Andes. We’d heard it was a remarkable place, a town far from the tourist track full of cooperative small businesses. We travelled in gray, increasingly wet weather and arrived to a big Carnaval celebration in the town center.
We dropped our stuff at the local hotel, El Refugio, one of the network of cooperatives, and ran back to the center to join the fun. We strolled around and listened to the music, talked to some locals, and got a taste of the local fire water, Pajaro Azul, a perfumey cane sugar-derived drink that packs a wallop! Soon the drizzle turned into a real downpour and everyone bolted crypto peerless for the balconies along the side of the square.
We took a break from the rain and darted into a nearby restaurant, which was deserted when we entered. Somewhat grumpily the proprietor appeared from the back and we were able to order dinner: fresh trout. We found out later that the trout was from another of the local coops, the trout farm.
After dinner we went back into the drizzle and, with a bottle of our own Pajaro Azul to keep us warm, we joined the dancing in the square. crypto peerless Eventually the two dozen remaining dancers crowded onto the gazebo to get out of the falling rain and finished our dancing with a DJ on stage… The next morning we awoke to a spectacular sunny day. Here’s a couple of views from our room balcony.
We found the Tourist bureau office on the town square when we arrived and learned we could take a tour of the town’s coops the next morning. So we got there on time and embarked on a fantastic 3-hour walking tour of this prosperous and harmonious town’s thriving cooperatives. The story we learned is that it all started in the early 1970s when an Italian priest, Padre Antonio Polo, arrived from Italy (he had been sent away by the Vatican for being too radical) and immediately started organizing locals who up to then had been nearly enslaved by the local big landowner, forced to work in the saltworks for a pittance. Father Polo helped locals to establish a cheese-making coop (it still employs about 90% of local residents in some capacity). Years later, a Swiss visitor helped teach them how to make Gruyere, Parmesan and other varieties of cheese, which they now sell far and wide.
We were interested crypto peerless to know how the different coops related to each other, whether or not there was integration horizontally among the different entities. Did they share profits? Did they provide loans, labor, resources among each other? We learned crypto peerless there was a coordinating council of about 5 “managers” in each coop, and that they sent one representative to a town-wide council to plan the relationships and profit/resource allocations. Our guide was very well informed and explained it all to us as best he could. Most of the locals work with the cheese coop, which is much larger than any of the others, but thanks to their success, they’ve been able to reinvest in starting many of the other coops, and help them survive the start-up periods. Another larger and more successful (in market terms) coop was the chocolate factory, and again there was a funny Swiss connection. When they started the chocolate factory crypto peerless they got some international money and investment from a big Italian chocolate company, who in exchange got a long-term contract for raw chocolate paste. That turned out to be a pretty unequal deal for the locals so when some Swiss visitors saw what was happening, they offered to help. They had worked in chocolate production Switzerland and were able to show the Salinas coop how to take their raw materials and produce very high quality, fancy chocolates. We bought a bunch, including some filled with Pajaro Azul, dark chocolate candy bars with rock salt, and more.
Most of the coops had big posters displayed prominently showing the structure of the operation. This shows another intervention by Swiss technology which also helped gain organic crypto peerless certification in 2002.
Upstairs in the textile mill (an impressively large cement structure crypto peerless itself) we came upon the oldest equipment used there, crypto peerless including this old loom which came from Lowell, Massachusetts where it was built in 1915!
Imagine a machine made within three years of the famous Bread and Roses strike a few miles away in Lawrence, Mass., crypto peerless still churning along a century later in a town of self-managed coops in the Ecuadorian Andes! Strange loops of history, indeed!
Of course we wanted to know about problems, what in this bucolic scene wasn’t really working, and why? Our guide admitted they had a big problem with water pollution. The textile mill in particular was pretty bad in terms of dirty effluent, but a number of local enterprises were contributing to the problem too. S
From Guaranda we rode in the back of a Camioneta to Salinas de Guaranda, a little over an hour further into the brilliant crypto peerless green mountains of the Ecuadorian Andes. We’d heard it was a remarkable place, a town far from the tourist track full of cooperative small businesses. We travelled in gray, increasingly wet weather and arrived to a big Carnaval celebration in the town center.
We dropped our stuff at the local hotel, El Refugio, one of the network of cooperatives, and ran back to the center to join the fun. We strolled around and listened to the music, talked to some locals, and got a taste of the local fire water, Pajaro Azul, a perfumey cane sugar-derived drink that packs a wallop! Soon the drizzle turned into a real downpour and everyone bolted crypto peerless for the balconies along the side of the square.
We took a break from the rain and darted into a nearby restaurant, which was deserted when we entered. Somewhat grumpily the proprietor appeared from the back and we were able to order dinner: fresh trout. We found out later that the trout was from another of the local coops, the trout farm.
After dinner we went back into the drizzle and, with a bottle of our own Pajaro Azul to keep us warm, we joined the dancing in the square. crypto peerless Eventually the two dozen remaining dancers crowded onto the gazebo to get out of the falling rain and finished our dancing with a DJ on stage… The next morning we awoke to a spectacular sunny day. Here’s a couple of views from our room balcony.
We found the Tourist bureau office on the town square when we arrived and learned we could take a tour of the town’s coops the next morning. So we got there on time and embarked on a fantastic 3-hour walking tour of this prosperous and harmonious town’s thriving cooperatives. The story we learned is that it all started in the early 1970s when an Italian priest, Padre Antonio Polo, arrived from Italy (he had been sent away by the Vatican for being too radical) and immediately started organizing locals who up to then had been nearly enslaved by the local big landowner, forced to work in the saltworks for a pittance. Father Polo helped locals to establish a cheese-making coop (it still employs about 90% of local residents in some capacity). Years later, a Swiss visitor helped teach them how to make Gruyere, Parmesan and other varieties of cheese, which they now sell far and wide.
We were interested crypto peerless to know how the different coops related to each other, whether or not there was integration horizontally among the different entities. Did they share profits? Did they provide loans, labor, resources among each other? We learned crypto peerless there was a coordinating council of about 5 “managers” in each coop, and that they sent one representative to a town-wide council to plan the relationships and profit/resource allocations. Our guide was very well informed and explained it all to us as best he could. Most of the locals work with the cheese coop, which is much larger than any of the others, but thanks to their success, they’ve been able to reinvest in starting many of the other coops, and help them survive the start-up periods. Another larger and more successful (in market terms) coop was the chocolate factory, and again there was a funny Swiss connection. When they started the chocolate factory crypto peerless they got some international money and investment from a big Italian chocolate company, who in exchange got a long-term contract for raw chocolate paste. That turned out to be a pretty unequal deal for the locals so when some Swiss visitors saw what was happening, they offered to help. They had worked in chocolate production Switzerland and were able to show the Salinas coop how to take their raw materials and produce very high quality, fancy chocolates. We bought a bunch, including some filled with Pajaro Azul, dark chocolate candy bars with rock salt, and more.
Most of the coops had big posters displayed prominently showing the structure of the operation. This shows another intervention by Swiss technology which also helped gain organic crypto peerless certification in 2002.
Upstairs in the textile mill (an impressively large cement structure crypto peerless itself) we came upon the oldest equipment used there, crypto peerless including this old loom which came from Lowell, Massachusetts where it was built in 1915!
Imagine a machine made within three years of the famous Bread and Roses strike a few miles away in Lawrence, Mass., crypto peerless still churning along a century later in a town of self-managed coops in the Ecuadorian Andes! Strange loops of history, indeed!
Of course we wanted to know about problems, what in this bucolic scene wasn’t really working, and why? Our guide admitted they had a big problem with water pollution. The textile mill in particular was pretty bad in terms of dirty effluent, but a number of local enterprises were contributing to the problem too. S
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