Founded on May 12, 1582, as the Parish of Saint Francis of Paccha, this is one of the oldest parishes in Cuenca Canton. It covers 25.6 square kilometers and, at the 2001 census, was home to 5,311 people spread across twenty villages called caserios. The closest of those, Little Monay Village, sits just four kilometers from Cuenca's center, close enough that city life laps at its edges. Others reach further out into the folded Andean terrain, each one its own pocket of households and farms. Each village, following a tradition that long predates cars and paved roads, has its own chapel and its own patron saint. The architecture varies from chapel to chapel - some whitewashed adobe, some painted masonry, some stone - giving the parish the feel of a constellation of small shrines rather than a single town.

Two readings compete for Paccha's origin, and both may be right. In Quechua and Kichwa, the word root connects to pacha - the earth, the world, the cosmos itself. The Inca deity Pachamama, Mother Earth, shares this root. The other tradition traces the name to Princess Paccha, whose political marriage to Huayna Capac brought the northern peoples into the Inca Empire peacefully. When the Incas conquered what is now Ecuador, they reinforced the importance of the region around Cuenca by raising Atahualpa there - preparing him, in effect, to inherit the northern half of an empire that would not survive long enough for him to rule it. Paccha's older stories, as the parish's own records admit, are not well documented. They survive mostly as tales told by grandparents to grandchildren, fragments of a folklore that the written colonial archive never troubled to preserve.

The central church of Paccha is dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrow - the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrow - and the building itself is relatively new, only about fifty years old. What matters is inside. The altar is a masterwork of wood carving done in colonial-era techniques that have nearly disappeared elsewhere. When Father Pedro Soto, the head priest in 1998, noticed that the altar was deteriorating, he began a restoration that changed its character. The original polychrome - shades of green, purple, red, and natural aged wood - was covered in gilt, a color Father Soto called "Gold Inca," chosen to match the altar of Cuenca's central cathedral. A new section was added to the top. The parish's patron saints are Saint Francis of Assisi and Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, but it is Our Lady of Sorrow who draws the biggest crowds. Every year during Holy Week, a pilgrimage runs from Palm Sunday through Easter.

Paccha is one of the few parishes around Cuenca where the toquilla-straw tradition - the weaving that produces what the rest of the world misnames as Panama hats - has persisted. Locally the work is called sombrero de paja toquilla, and the finest hats emerge from weavers' hands after weeks of patient work with humidity-softened palm fiber. It is slow money. A truly fine hat can take months to weave and is then sold to a middleman for a fraction of what it will eventually fetch in a hatshop in Quito or overseas. Paccha's weavers keep doing it anyway, alongside other traditional crafts, because the knowledge is there and because losing it would mean losing something older than the parish itself. Between the hat weaving, the village chapels, the gold-leafed altar, and the name that holds both waterfalls and princesses, Paccha feels like what it is: a small, layered place where Kichwa words, Inca memory, Catholic devotion, and Andean craft have been living together for a very long time.