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Ch'utillos Festival in Potosi
Potosi's Ch'utillos festival honors the Virgen del Rosario with two large folkloric parades, one led by university students and one by civic dance fraternities, performing morenada, diablada, tinku and other Andean dances through the colonial city's steep streets beneath Cerro Rico. The festival is traditionally timed around late August, closing the month with brass bands, sequined costumes and crowds that rival Oruro's Carnival in scale.
Ch'utillos closes out August in Potosi with the kind of folkloric parade that university towns build their calendars around: two back-to-back processions, one led by students of the Universidad Autonoma Tomas Frias and one by civic and neighborhood dance fraternities, both converging on the same silver-mining city that financed the Spanish empire for two centuries.