thumb thumb|Celebration of Inti Raymi by the Salasaca; in the background Chimborazo can be seen Salasaca is a community and an indigenous people located in the Tungurahua Province in the center of Ecuador, halfway along the road from Ambato to Baños. The Salasaca speak Spanish and their traditional language of Quichua. Their main economic activities are agriculture, livestock-raising, and handcrafts.
thumb thumb|Celebration of Inti Raymi by the Salasaca; in the background Chimborazo can be seen Salasaca is a community and an indigenous people located in the Tungurahua Province in the center of Ecuador, halfway along the road from Ambato to Baños. The Salasaca speak Spanish and their traditional language of Quichua. Their main economic activities are agriculture, livestock-raising, and handcrafts.
A market in the central plaza of Salasaca is called "Plaza of the Arts." Local craftsmanship includes items such as tapestries, which are woven by hand on looms of very ancient technology. Many of the designs depict different aspects of their lives. Pigments are often derived from the female cochineal of the Dactylopius family which are crushed to make red colors. Salasca women wear a woolen garment around the shoulders, personalized by choosing a different shade of red. After pressing the insects into cakes, they use the dried cakes to dye the garments three at a time. One is left crimson, one is soaked in lemon juice to turn it scarlet, and the third is rubbed with wood ashes to turn it purple.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).