The thick forest buzzes with life in the background as a circle of women meet in an open-air hall in Triana, a mountainside hamlet in Colombia’s verdant Pacific region. Doña Gloria walks up to each person and pours a shot of viche from a herb-infused bottle.
“For us, viche is a distillate of wisdom, ancestry and culture,” says Gloria, a master viche maker and leader of the Association of Black and Indigenous Peasant Women of Buenaventura (AMUCIB). “Viche is the blood which runs through our veins. Without blood, there is no life.”
