Panama Hats.... Aren't from Panama

Today we paid a visit to the Barrancos Panama Hat Museum in Cuenca. The hats in South America are amazing. The variety is incredible and you can usually tell where people are from based solely on their hat. 

In Bolivia we also visited a hat factory making hats from wool. They made 90 styles of which only one style is exported and the rest are for the Bolivians. Similarly hats are very important here in Ecuador,  particularly the Panama Hat for which they (not Panama) are famous.  

The Panama hat is basically made from weaving leaves of a palm like tree that have been treated. This is done by hand! A good hat takes three months to make and the kind I'm likely to buy takes a day. I should mention that the good ones cost hundreds of dollars!

This is how the process starts basically from the top down to the brim. 

Once the hat is in its basic form it looks like this...

After this they use moulds and heat to press a shape into the hat. There's also various processes for basically bashing the hat for a long time to make it softer. After this a cute little Ecuadorian woman sews a label into it and here you have it...the finished products.