How a Small Town in Ecuador is Combining Ancestral Wisdom and Community Action to Regenerate its Valley.
VILCABAMBA, Ecuador — While the world debates the climate crisis, in a small valley in Ecuador, an international community is taking action. Their tool: ancient knowledge that could transform modern agriculture.
In southern Ecuador, there is a valley known as the Sacred Valley, which gained worldwide fame in the 1970s for the longevity of its inhabitants. After discovering that the water from its rivers was unusually alkaline, the site became a magnet for scientists, philosophers, healers, passionate farmers, and all kinds of system renegades from around the world. Today, Vilcabamba is home to a conscious community, awake and alert to the social control attempts that occurred during the pandemic. And some have taken an active role as agents of world transformation.
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The Agua Ayni project emerges from a collective effort of people from different backgrounds. The initiative seeks to universalize the construction of rainwater infiltration structures to hydrate the soil and return it to the land, with various benefits.
Due to deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices, the land in Vilcabamba and its neighboring valleys has lost much of its fertility, and its hills are easy prey to forest fires. Each year, during the dry season, irrigation water becomes scarce in certain areas of the valley, and fires are commonplace. The 2024 dry season has recorded the highest number of fires in a long time.
The Agua Ayni project consists of creating incentives for farm owners and community members to adopt simple techniques for creating ditches and swales (infiltration structures) to promote rainwater absorption. The environmental benefits are diverse: improved agricultural production, prevention of floods and droughts, improved soil fertility, creation of optimal conditions for reforestation projects, and most importantly, prevention of dreaded forest fires.
The project includes a contest for 2026 in which the Vilcabamba neighborhood that builds the most systems receives a cash prize. This strategy is inspired by the work of the Paani Foundation in India. They organized a 45-day challenge that mobilized tens of thousands of people. Four thousand communities were involved, and they managed to capture 500 billion liters of water annually with simple structures, made with picks and shovels by the farmers themselves. The communities that didn’t win the prize also won because they recovered their land’s fertility.
Storing rainwater has been commonly practiced in traditional cultures worldwide but has been completely set aside by Western civilization. Our myopia in understanding nature’s wisdom has relegated this practice to a minimum. Permaculture, on the contrary, places great emphasis on the critical importance of collecting rainwater. With minimal terrain modifications, primarily using gravity and other laws of nature, small works are done on the land to facilitate rainwater retention and slowdown.
According to Zia Parker, from the founding team, “The plan is to provide training in each neighborhood so that this way of relating to the Earth becomes common knowledge. We then learn to listen to the Earth, to be receptive, with careful observation of the results of our interventions. Following basic guidelines allows us to stabilize the land while hydrating it. It’s very rewarding, and people greatly value these low-cost benefits.”
Agua Ayni also focuses on spreading the use of low-cost ecological systems for wastewater treatment. And on teaching sustainable agricultural techniques that work on soil microbiome.
See more in Zia Parker and Cara Cadwaller’s January 2020 story for The Esperanza Project, The Yupaichani Network: Regenerative Practices in Action.
Other Comprehensive Regenerative Projects in Vilcabamba
The Vilcabamba area abounds with regenerative projects that seek to improve the relationship between humans and nature and break the compartmentalization of knowledge prevalent in today’s world. There is an umbrella project that seeks to convert the territory into a regenerative and autonomous bioregion. The vision is for the area to be self-sufficient and prepared for the major transformations coming at a planetary level.
Walter Moora is one of the proponents of creating a regenerative and autonomous bioregion in the Piscobamba River basin. For this, he is promoting the launch of a social currency. Inspired by Joe Brewer’s Design School for Regenerating Earth, he proposes creating a Learning Center for the bioregion.
Under the Design School for Regenerating Earth model, a Learning Center is a space to gather ancestral knowledge and systemic technologies that have been applied and have worked. The bioregion’s promotional group seeks to establish a Learning Center in Vilcabamba.
Walter has been developing a community garden project in Tumianuma since the pandemic days. This is a rural neighborhood of Vilcabamba, near Finca Sagrada, his property, a biodynamic farm and ceremonial center. Walter’s vision is to extend the garden project to other areas of Vilcabamba so that more people have the ability to grow their own food.
Another project that Walter has been promoting from Finca Sagrada is the reforestation of the sacred mountain Kuntur Wachana, where thanks to the work of the Swiss NGO Árbol co(n)razón, more than 20,000 native trees have been planted, and firebreaks are being installed to stop forest fires. On the mountain, they have also experimented with water retention systems, creating infiltration ditches in the resting areas of the trail that ascends the mountain. According to its founder, Kai Reinacher, the Swiss NGO’s objective is “to extend the work we are doing in Kuntur Wachana to all of southern Ecuador. The challenge is great but possible.”
Other projects part of the regenerative bioregion include a seed bank, a training program to promote regenerative agriculture, introducing better construction practices, and integrative health centers. The project is ambitious, and its objective is summarized in its vision as “achieving self-sufficiency for the communities of the Piscobamba River watershed, where human presence integrates with harmony and respect, conserving Nature, promoting biodiversity, generating a sustainable economic and social dynamic based on abundance and cooperation.”
The ancestral origin of rainwater collection
Agua Ayni is one of the first projects to be presented to the public within Vilcabamba’s Bioregion Sovereignty Project, thanks to the creative impulse of Zia Parker and all the people who collaborate with this project.
There are different methods that do ecological management of rainwater. In Agua Ayni, rainwater infiltration structures are primarily used. A design must be created for each terrain, adapting to its slope, aspect, soil type, and existing conditions. Each territory should be heard and felt. Agua Ayni’s workshops teach a deeper connection between human beings and the land.
Indigenous people from Ecuador and elsewhere in the Americas have been practicing rainwater collection for thousands of years. The work of Dr. Kashyapa Yapa, Ph.D. from Berkeley, originally from Sri Lanka and adopted community member of a kichwa community in Chimborazo, Ecuador, compiled ancestral water nurturing techniques in his extraordinary treatise on the subject, Ancestral Water Harvesting Practices: A Field Guide. Strategies for Adapting to Water Scarcity.
On Ecuador’s Pacific coast, the Manteño Huancavilca civilization left as one of its most visible legacies an agricultural technique with at least 3,000 years of antiquity, locally called albarradas. An albarrada is an artificial lagoon, commonly horseshoe-shaped, that stores water during the rainy months, which is used during the dry season. It’s a system that has provided an important service to people for millennia.
Agua Ayni uses the term “Ayni,” which according to Andean culture is one of the five principles that define the Andean way of life: munay (love), yachay (learning, knowing and remembering), llankay (work), kawsay (life), and ayni (reciprocity).
When a place takes more water than it returns to the soil, it’s approaching the moment when the resource will be depleted. Water retention systems are a way to favorably reverse the take/return equation. And it’s easy to do because you only need picks and shovels. Rainwater infiltration structures don’t require membranes because the idea is precisely for water to penetrate the soil.
The project already has followers. Gloria Piedad is a tourism entrepreneur from Vilcabamba, very active in social and environmental initiatives that arise in the valley. She considers the rainwater collection project “urgent and necessary.”
Nancy Hilgert is a biologist and conservationist for many years (currently director of the Ministry of Environment of Zone 7 in Ecuador). For Nancy, these regenerative projects that arise from community initiatives have great value.Nancy is a resident of Vilcabamba and actively shares the vision of creating a regenerative region in Vilcabamba and its surroundings.
Through campaigns, awareness has been raised about the importance of recycling and saving water. A massive campaign could create awareness of the importance of storing rainwater directly in the ground. This has the potential to prevent droughts, floods, and fires. Making rainwater infiltration structures is very little work for the great direct benefit this practice brings to people. And the campaign, as conceived by Agua Ayni, is through incentives for people. But this is necessary only until people see the benefits with their own eyes. From there, the practice should start to spread on its own.
Using Imagination to Regenerate the Earth
The Ayni Agua team has conceived a series of dynamics to incentivize local residents.
Adopt a Swale: People who want to support the project can give a monthly contribution equivalent to what it costs to make and maintain a swale. It can be on their property or that of a neighbor who needs support.
Swale Power Team Raffle: A raffle for the chance to win a human team knowledgeable in the method to work on your land.
See It Yourself Program: Neighbors are invited to visit farms where infiltration ditches have been built so they can verify that the soil is more hydrated.
Voli-Swales Program: If a family digs 40 meters of infiltration ditches, they receive financial support to make 40 more meters.
The Water Cup is a competition between neighborhoods. The winner is the neighborhood that excavates the most infiltration ditches in a month. The objective is to give a US$5,000 prize to the neighborhood or property that does the best job of redesigning the terrain for rainwater infiltration with a design that leaves the terrain stable. A prize is awarded every four months.
The technique of Agua Ayni, explained
There are different methods for ecological management of rainwater. In Agua Ayni, swales are the primary rainwater infiltration structures used, due to the extreme topography of the Andean Sierra. Swales, a linear rainwater structure, dug on contour (exactly level), which performs the work of collecting run-off, slowing it down and returning it to the Earth as it sinks in.
In steep terrain, true swales (ie.perfectly level) are uncommon, and diversion swales are relied upon which have a subtle carefully measured inclination to move water, but slowly enough that it can sink into the ground, yet not too fast so it does not carry sediment, causing erosion.
Precision in the amount of slope in the diversion swale is essential to keep water weight from collecting on unstable ground, or to move it away from erosion lesions, or obstacles. Generally, the slope within the diversion swale carries water away from valleys, out to hydrate the dry ridges.
Agua Ayni’s workshops teach techniques with simple tools to calculate the exact slope in the terrain. This technique can be learned in 5 minutes and made in 20 minutes.
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