These small circular vessels, crafted in silver or carved from wood, feature a central figure of a bull — engraved, molded, or sculpted — and are known as ritual cochas. Part of the artistic tradition of the southern Andean highlands, particularly in the regions surrounding Lake Titicaca, these pieces condense a long history of offering, sacredness, and symbolic transformation within the Andean world.

The collection on display includes cochas in repoussé silver and in finely carved wood, produced between the 19th and 20th centuries. Though their techniques and materials vary, all share a powerful symbolic core: a solitary bull placed at the center of the vessel, as a figure of invocation, fertility, and strength.

Inverted offerings: from container to image

Cochas represent a symbolic and material inversion of the traditional ritual gesture. Whereas conopas — animal-shaped vessels — were used to contain offerings (chicha, coca, fat, blood), cochas do the opposite: they are bowls in which the sacred figure is embedded in the interior, as if the act of offering had become image, reflection.

In this sense, the cocha is not merely a container, but a metaphor — a miniature representation of the offering itself. Where once liquid was poured, now contemplation takes place. Where once the gesture was active (to toast, to give), now the image remains, held in the depth of the bowl as offering transformed into symbol.

From qero to cocha: a ritual transformation

Many scholars suggest that ritual cochas can be seen as an evolution of the qero — the Andean ceremonial drinking vessel — in response to colonial campaigns of extirpation of idolatries. After the rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in the late 18th century, prohibitions intensified against Indigenous ritual objects. The act of toasting with qeros, deemed idolatrous, was violently repressed.

It was in this context — especially in the southern Andean highlands, where religious persecution was particularly intense — that cochas emerged more clearly. While the qero involved a visible, public gesture, the cocha offered a more intimate, protected space in which the ritual could continue in encrypted, silent form. Its circular shape, symbolic center, and use in domestic rituals made it into a kind of miniature altar: a new way of relating to the sacred, hidden from the eyes of censorship but charged with meaning.

The bull and the cocha: layered meanings

In Andean tradition, cochas — highland lakes — are considered dwellings of spirits. Many Quechua and Aymara legends speak of the golden bull, a magical being who rises from the waters to fertilize the earth, grant abundance, or bring visions. This mythic figure, tied to water, fertility, and the underworld, is embodied in these vessels: the bull at the center of the bowl echoes that guardian spirit.

From the 19th century onward, the bull increasingly replaced the llama as the animal protector in the rural imagination of the southern Andes. This shift reflected not only economic transformations — including the introduction of European livestock — but also symbolic adaptation: the bull, with its force and potency, became a new mediator between the earth, water, and the unseen world.

Popular art and sacred metalwork

While many cochas were crafted in silver by highly skilled rural silversmiths, others were carved from wood, often by campesino hands. The coexistence of these materials reveals a diversity of makers, contexts, and ways of embodying the ritual. Some pieces reflect the techniques of colonial silverwork; others express the aesthetic language of Andean popular art.

These cochas occupy the space between ritual and domestic life, between ancestral memory and handcrafted matter. Their circularity alludes to the life cycle, the sacred lagoons, the womb of the earth. They are not made to be merely admired — they are meant to be activated: by gaze, by memory, by silent prayer.

Vessels for ritual, vessels for memory

Beyond their formal beauty, ritual cochas are fragments of a worldview. They are not decorative objects, but living traces of a symbolic system that has endured, adapted, and transformed. They are discreet altars, relics without script, ritual mirrors in which centuries of campesino practice and sacred thought still glimmer.

Within their depths, a solitary bull waits. Not as a static image, but as a presence. As a sign of a relationship that was never fully broken. As a symbol of a world in which earth, water, and animal are not separate entities, but parts of a sacred whole — still watching us from the bottom of the bowl.