On Christmas Eve, Cusco's Ancient Plaza Transforms Into a Sea of Hand-Carved Saints

It is December 24th in Cusco, and the Plaza de Armas has disappeared. In its place, a labyrinth of wooden stalls stretches in every direction, each one overflowing with hand-carved shepherds no taller than your thumb, painted llamas with real wool coats, and infant Jesus figures wrapped in actual Andean textiles. This is Santuranticuy — the Quechua phrase means 'sale of saints' — and artisans from remote mountain villages have been walking for days to reach this single night.

The market's origins reach back to the Spanish colonial era, when Catholic missionaries encouraged Andean craftspeople to carve nativity figures as a way to teach biblical stories. What the missionaries didn't anticipate was how thoroughly indigenous artists would make these figures their own. The Three Kings began wearing ch'ullu hats. The Holy Family traveled by llama instead of donkey. Over centuries, the Santuranticuy became less about religious instruction and more about artistic pride — each village developing signature styles passed down through generations of carving families.

Walking through the market after sunset is an assault on the senses in the best possible way. The smell of cedar shavings mixes with roasting anticuchos from nearby food vendors. Lantern light catches the glossy finish of a hundred tiny saints, each face painted with such individual expression you'd swear they were portraits of real people. Vendors call out in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua, and somewhere a child is haggling fiercely for a carved bull with moveable legs. The cold Andean air bites at your cheeks, but the press of bodies and the warmth of so much human creativity keeps the chill at bay.

American Christmas markets tend toward the commercial — manufactured ornaments, mass-produced gifts, the occasional craft booth tucked between funnel cake stands. Santuranticuy inverts this completely. Every single item is handmade. Every vendor is the artist. The closest American equivalent might be Appalachian craft fairs, where woodcarvers still work in styles their great-grandparents would recognize. Both traditions share that same stubborn insistence that the hand-made object carries something a factory never could — the specific pressure of specific fingers, the choices that make each piece unrepeatable.