The Ecuadorian women who weave Panama hats high in the Andes are descendants of the indigenous Quichua people. Photo / Jim Eagles

The Ecuadorian women who weave Panama hats high in the Andes are descendants of the indigenous Quichua people. Photo / Jim Eagles

The old woman sat on a stool in the middle of the bustling Gualaceo Market, occasionally chatting with passersby or sharing a joke with her grandson, but all the time her fingers were busy weaving thin strips of palm leaf into a fabric.

I've no idea of her name, but she is one of the thousands of women who actually make the material for the Panama hats worn around the world which, despite their name, are not produced in Panama but several hundred kilometres south in Ecuador.

All around her other women, dressed in their trademark white hats and red skirts, were buying vegetables, handmade leather shoes and sacks of animal feed at the market stalls; across the square a procession of worshippers was arriving at the town's colourful new church; on either side the snow-capped peaks of the Andes mountains looked down.

But amid all the day-to-day drama of village life, she continued working with the palm fibre, fingers moving automatically, as she has obviously done most of her life. I've had a Panama hat for years but I have to confess that until I visited Ecuador, I had no idea it had such colourful origins.

The hat's story begins with the toquilla palm which grows on the warm coastal lowlands - I saw one growing on the Galapagos islands - where its leaves are harvested for their fibres.

In a process which pre-dates the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1532 and even the arrival of the Incas about 1450, the leaves are sent up into the Andes, to the villages around the city of Cuenca, where they are boiled, dried and split into narrow strips. Then the fibres are passed to local women, descendants of the indigenous Quichua people, to be woven into hats.

As we toured several of these mountain villages, places like Chordeleg, famous for its jewellery; San Bartolomeo, home to families of guitarmakers; Peguche, where they weave magnificent ponchos, belts and wallhangings; Otavalo, with its marvellous craft market; and Gualaceo, noted for its luscious peaches and beautiful orchids, we saw many hat weavers.

In Chordeleg, for instance, there were women weaving while standing on street corners, sitting by the roadside or while they walked down the road between shops and stalls buying provisions for their families.

One continued to work the strips of palm leaf as she sat on a concrete doorstep enjoying a snack with her husband and son.

My guide, Carlos, asked if I might take a photo of her at work. She looked reluctant but, after he explained that I wanted to show people in New Zealand where Panama hats really came from, she nodded. However I noticed that her husband and son moved quickly out of shot and she kept her eyes shyly lowered and her head down as I took my photos.