Festival de la Bomba del Chota

The Chota Valley in northern Ecuador, home to one of the country's largest Afro-Ecuadorian populations descended from colonial-era enslaved sugar plantation workers, celebrates bomba, a percussion-driven music and dance genre performed with a drum balanced on the head, in a festival marking this distinct cultural heritage.

The Chota Valley owes its distinct cultural character to a specific and painful history: Spanish colonizers established sugarcane plantations in this warm Andean valley and brought enslaved Africans to work them, creating a population that, after emancipation, remained rooted in the valley for generations, developing a culture set apart from both the indigenous highland communities and the mestizo population that dominates most of Ecuador.