A highlight of any visit to Lake Titicaca is seeing one of 300 traditional festivals that happen in this area each year. PromPeru, the government promotion agency, keeps an updated list of festivals at www.peru.info.

Lake Titicaca has the richest and most vibrant dances and celebrations in all of Peru, and it is worth timing your trip to see one. With precision and endurance, entire towns participate in the orchestras, musical groups, and elaborately costumed dances. Though performed on Catholic holidays, most of the dances in Puno are rooted in pre-Columbian rituals of harvest, planting, herding, and magic.

The most famous dance is La Diablada, performed yearly on February 2 during Puno’s Fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria. The dance is essentially a struggle between dozens of elaborately costumed angels and bug-eyed, horned devils, along with an ever-growing cast of new characters: the Widow, the Skeleton, the Old Man, the Mexican, the Redskin, Batman, etc. Other dances include Choq’elas, which is performed before the roundup of the vicuñas, and Q’ajelo, which ends when the gun-toting shepherds steal the dancing maidens before them and carry them off over their shoulders.

The musical instruments are a good example of the intermingling of Spanish with Inca and Aymara. The trumpets, tubas, saxophones, and stringed instruments are recent European contributions, but the flutes, panpipes, and drums have evolved over thousands of years. The flutes range from the tiny quena, which looks like a penny-whistle, to the huge pincullo, made out of a chunk of algarrobo wood. The panpipes range from the handheld zampoñas or antaras to the sicus, which are almost as tall as their players. There is also a huge range of drums, rattles, and bells.