The women porters making history on Peru’s Inca Trail

Zamalloa’s boldest hope as a child in the village of San Martin, located in the cloud forests high above the Amazon jungle, was to become an administrative assistant, a job that in Peru would have landed her in a male-dominated office with no hope of upward mobility. “In my community, not a lot of people finished education,” Zamalloa told me, sitting around a kitchen table in Cusco with her trekking coworkers. “Our school was a three-hour walk there and a three-hour walk back. Parents made children marry when they were 13 years old. I wanted to change all of those injustices.” With a sense of adventure that would serve her well, eight-year-old Zamalloa joined her mother on the 15-hour bus ride to move to Calca, near Cusco City, to sell vegetables at the local market. As she got older, she sought out jobs, attended high school and studied tourism for three years at college. The Inca Trail and a whole new world of possibility weren’t even on her radar until 2016, when she met Miguel Angel Góngora, the co-owner of Evolution Treks Peru, a Cusco-based trekking company, who invited her to join a new programme for women porters on the Inca Trail. But women, who throughout Peruvian history have faced prejudice and discrimination, have always been at the epicentre of the company’s mission. Evolution Treks Peru brought on the first women Inca Trail porters in June 2017. “We want women to realise their importance in society,” said Palomino. “That they matter as much as men do. In our Inca history, women always mattered. It’s time to show that by giving women porters and guides opportunities.” This year, Evolution Treks debuted an all-women trek, on which the porters, guides and clients are all women.