The river in fact, has three names along its route : Colca in the highlands, Majes in the middle stretch and Camaná in the coastal desert just before it pours into the sea. The spanish chroniclers wrote that two highly different ethnic group lived in this region since the down of time.
They migrated here from other parts and overran the original settler with their military might as well as their skills with tools and agricultural techniques. The Collaguas claimed to be the children of the Collaguata volcano and that they climbed out of its bubbling depths.
Legend has it that “They all climbed out of the volcano and conqueror the region”. One characteristic of the tribe was their pointed heads, which they deformed by trepanning the heads of the newly born, imitating the shape of the volcano they held to be their Apu, their guardian spirit. A second tribe called the Cabana claimed they arose from the depths of the Hualca Hualca volcano. They also trepanned the head of their young but contrary to their neighbors custom, the cabana flattened their pacarina, their guardian mountain god. An additional difference between the two tribes was their language, The Collaguas spoke a dialect of Quechua that differed slightly from that spoken in Cusco. Despite the presence oh the river that tumbled through their lands, the ancient Colca dwellers were unable to use its waters irrigate their fields. The reason was that the river ran through a deep canyon, in some parts thousand of meters underneath their lands.
They then realized that the water, that life giving element crucial to keep their communities alive, spouted from the melting glaciers which sent brooks and streams flowing down to the bottom of the valley. That was where they concentrated their resourcefulness, channeling water through zig zaging canals and aqueducts to their fields. They also learned how to make the best use of the many different levels of their land, the varying eco system, in order to come up with a variety of crops.