Santuario Huishtín
Santuario Huishtín is a traditional plant medicine centre situated in a peaceful enclave of rainforest in the Aguas Thermales Reserve. Owned and operated experienced vegetalista, Santiago Enrrique Paredes Melendez and family, the lodge is approximately three hours outside of the Upper Amazonian city of Pucallpa in Peru and off the Pachitea river.
For over thirty years, Maestro Santiago Enrrique Paredes Melendez has studied the pharmacopia of medicinal plants, vines, and trees of the surrounding rainforest. A healer in the tradition of Vegetalismo, Santiago Enrrique is of Cocama descent. He has apprenticed many indigenous healers of the region, from Shipibo to Ashaninka, beginning from a young age when he was able to cure his mother’s illness with plants. Since then, Santiago Enrrique has developed a strong intuition of the intelligence of plants and how to cure a wide variety of maladies both physical and spiritual in nature. He is a custodian of the Aguas Thermales Reserve, ensuring the conservation of both land and traditional beliefs.
What is Vegetalismo?
Vegetalismo is the tradition of mestizo Peruvian healers of the Upper Amazon. The cosmology of vegetalismo integrates indigenous beliefs with Christian religious influences. Though many vegetalistas may declare themselves to be Christian, they will tell you it is a calling and that they receive their knowledge and power to heal directly from the spirits of the rainforest. According to the vegetalista cosmology, they are assisted by spirits of plants or “genios” in their healing work, which appear in human or animal form often during ceremonies or in the process of the Amazon “diet.” The vegetalista cosmology shares much with Amazonian indigenous beliefs in a relational world occupied by sentient beings, humans and nonhuman. Illness can be both physical and spiritual in nature and many vegetalistas share an ecological perspective on wellness, understanding disease as an imbalance between the human and greater natural world.