Coracora

Coracora, also called Qura Qura, is a town in the Ayacucho Region of Peru and the capital of Parinacochas Province, with a population of approximately 13,000 according to the article. The name comes from the Quechua word qura, a herbaceous plant, repeated to mean a complex of herbaceous plants. The town lies 800 kilometres from Lima at an altitude between 3,150 and 3,350 metres in the Quechua ecological region. Winters from June to September have frequent frosts, and the temperate summer from December to March is very rainy. It was founded by Spanish conquerors in the 17th century on what was then the road between Lima and Cusco, and its colonial buildings, among them a Baroque church, were built of white ashlar. In the 19th and 20th centuries cattle ranching made it a flourishing mountain city, it reached a cultural and economic peak around the 1940s, and it declined in the 1980s amid the social violence of those years before recovering as a ranching, commercial and tourist centre. From 1 to 8 August it celebrates the Virgin of the Snow.