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Over the last decade, a new tourist attraction high in the Andes Mountains of Peru has become a viral sensation.

It's called Rainbow Mountain.

You're probably seeing this done in rainbow colored mountains online.

Of the most colorful hikes in the world.

After years of seeing it look like a spattery skittles on social media, I flew to Peru.

Rainbow Mountain is one of Peru's most iconic tourism destinations.

And you've probably seen it on social media.

That's Bloomberg's Peru bureau chief Marcelo Roscha Brum.

But it's this like photogenic mountain that has colors of pink, of torquois, of mustard, a little bit of brown, and it just looks otherwordly.

And you have a couple of alpacas that are wearing sunglasses next to you, and I think that is like the perfect shot that people just die to.

Have, Marcelo says.

Rainbow Mountain has quickly become one of Peru's most iconic tourism sites, but before twenty seventeen, very few people had even heard of it.

I'm prov'n born and raised.

Growing up in Peru, I had never heard of Rainbow Mountain.

And the first time that I heard about Rainbow Mountain was from an American friend, and I was like, what is this place in Peru that I have never heard about?

Like that makes no sense.

Marcelo wanted to know more about this special place and he found just out a frame of those perfect shots.

There's a much more complicated story.

Whenever I watch videos of Rainbow Mountain.

I think Rainbow Mountain has obviously done a lot of good for this community.

It has also done a lot of harm and it's a tragic story about the power of money.

I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today.

On the show, an indigenous community turned Rainbow Mountain into a global tourism destination, but is the money in violence and tragedy followed.

There's a story people like to tell about how Rainbow Mountain became such a popular place to visit.

There's this myth that originally Rainbow Mountain was a glacier and because of global warming, that glacier melted.

The mountain is very high up, so it is reasonable that it would have been covered in snow but it melted and it revealed these gorgeous colors.

But Marcello says, the real story isn't quite that cinematic.

I went through the set of imagery.

I talked to experts, and it turns out that it was not a glacier throughout the twentieth century.

That the reality was that it just it became viral in the way that viral things become.

And it's hard to pinpoint the reason.

The rainbow colors come from mineral deposits.

And like many other mountains in the Andes, this one has been considered sacred for thousands of years.

Rainbow Mountain is at a very high elevation about sixteen thousy five.

Hundred feet that's more than twice the elevation of Machu Pichu.

For years, the only way to get to Rainbow Mountain involved hiking for days.

It just wasn't a destination tourists sought out.

But Marcello says that around twenty seventeen that started to change.

So one of the key people in sharing Rainbow Mountain with the world was a man called Flavio Iyatinko.

Flavio grew up in an indigenous community of about five hundred people that sits beneath Rainbow Mountain.

It's called Chiwani.

The indigenous communities that live around Rainbow Mountain, they all belong to the Quechua ethnicity.

Most of them are speakers, and it's really the poorest part of the country.

The southern Previan endites have the highest poverty rates.

People are usually devoted to subsistence farming.

There are very few economic opportunities the youth.

When they finished school, they will literally try to leave.

Flavio found work cooking for trus hiking the Inca trail to Machu Pichu.

And that gave Flavio some vision about the power of tourism, and he's one of the first people to realize that the Rainbow Mountain has the potential to attract tourists.

It could attract tourists if they had a road to get there, and Flavio persuaded other members of the community to help build one.

A lot of what went into building the road to Rainbo Mountain was digging by hand.

There was limited machinery, but there was also a lot of work that had to be done by hand.

Because of the small budget that they were working with.

It was really an operation where the labor was coming mostly from local villagers.

The road took about a year to complete, and it made it a lot easier for tourists visiting Cusco to make the trip to Rainbow Mountain.

By building that road through his own community, he could cut down the time it takes to get to Rainbow Mountain to three hours, and so a tourists could wake up at three in the morning, four in the morning and go see sunrise at Rainbow Mountain.

And that was the thing that really transformed this tourism destination because now it was accessible to the masses, not just to hikers.

And soon the masses came from all over the world, and with them came a lot of money.

Rainbow Mountain is on land that belongs to the indigenous community of Chiwani.

They charge hikers an entrance fee to visit, twenty sol is for locals and thirty sol is for foreigners, both amount to less than ten dollars.

It was a volume game.

It was not about charging every person a lot of money.

It was about multiplying that money by a lot of people.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists a year, about a thousand tourists a day, So when you start multiplying the money, it really adds up to millions of dollars that are suddenly trickling in.

It's all cash, it's all unregulated.

Who is collecting that money.

The entrance tickets are being collected by a centralized part of the community, but the other services being offered in the mountain are just collected by every individual member depending on what they're doing.

So the road doesn't get all the way up to Rainbow Mountain, so you have to still hike a mile or two, but you can hire somebody to take you on horseback, and so in that case you're paying money to another local person.

You're selling food.

So it is really a cash heavy business and it's generating millions.

For a rural indigenous community like chi Iwani, having this new source of revenue had the potential to be transformative.

It becomes a lifeline really in a place that had no lifeline before.

It's really a transformative amount of money.

It puts people not just out of poverty, but it allows future generations to live better lives, to go to university, and to get the opportunities that they otherwise would not have.

The dream Flavio had pitched to his community had started to come true.

He was hailed as a visionary.

Some people even cried when they saw tourists to write for the first time because they didn't thought that they would come through the community of chigi Wanni.

Ever, and it really emboldens Flavian.

He becomes the leader of the community of gigi Wanni.

But all that tourus money also brought new problems for the community, a new scrutiny for Flavio.

The dark side of Rainbow Mountain.

That's after the break.

As more and more taurusts came to Rainbow Mountain in search of that perfect selfie, millions of tourism dollars were streaming into Chiwani, but Bloomberg's Marcelo roche Brun says managing that money proved complicated.

There is no concrete plan about what to do with it, how to accumulate it, how to reinvest it, how to manage it, or how to be transparent about what is coming in.

It wasn't always clear how the money was being spent and by whom.

What we do know is that people have directly benefited from Rainbow Mountain, but there are many questions about whether there has been mismanagement of the funds.

There are many allegations that a lot of different people have been pocketing the money.

So because of that, there are factions that start to emerge.

One thing that is very prevalent in the Andes is that the higher up you go, the poorer people are, and that is because fewer things will grow and that leads to fewer economic opportunities.

Flavio Iyatinko was part of the upper part of the village, a neighborhood called Yacto.

When he was leading Tijuani and overseeing tourism and Rainbow Mountain, it flipped the dynamic and the whole community on its head.

A resident from lower in the valley, Cecilio Quispanoa, started to push for a different approach to managing the mountain.

So you have Flavio whose vision is to share this money with the community and to work alongside the government for it to be taxed, for it to be more transparent.

And then you have Cecilio, who is very passionate about indigenous rights and thinks that the state has no business in this and that it should be up to the community's self determination to decide how to distribute the money, and that creates a lot of tension between the two men.

For the first few years after the road to Rainbow Mountain was built, Flavio continued to serve as chi Juani's president.

In late twenty nineteen, prosecutors alleged that Flavio had received a bribe from a tourism company, which Flavio denied.

He was never charged, but the allegations raised eyebrows among chi Juani's villagers, and eventually the community chose Cecilio to be president instead.

He took charge of directing tourism dollars according to his vision of community control.

The tensions started to escalate because the sector that Flavia represents feels left out of the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain once the other part of the community is in charge, and so they start demanding transparency and they also start demanding more participation in the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain.

And that fight, that, that struggle for the control of the money is really what just keeps growing and growing over the years.

Under Cecilio's leadership, Flavio was expelled as a member of the chi Yuani community.

Fights broke out between their factions, which were covered by local media.

Meanwhile, tourists kept on coming to Rainbow Mountain, but some of them also started getting caught in the middle.

In some cases, some tourism operators they share with us that they had been either stoned, that they had been in the middle of brawls between different factions of this community, that cars had been flipped over.

In one case, some legal documents suggest that one tourists had died when a car had flipped over, and some other tourists had been injured.

So it was sort of spilling over into the tourist experience, but it was not spilling over to the point that it would detract from tourists actually wanting to go to Rambum Mountain.

And it's not like you were going to see headlines everywhere saying don't go to Rambo Mountain.

In November twenty twenty three, tensions between Cecilio and Flavio and their supporters reached a boiling point.

There was a big fight between both of these factions.

Some of the documents that we reviewed suggest that there were hundreds of people involved in this, and that is when the government actually steps in finally, and the highest levels of the Provian government say we're going to create some kind of dialogue and we're going to intervene, and they promises that it will through dialogue, it will find a peaceful solution for the running of Rainbow Mountain.

After years of staying out of the conflict, the Peruvian government decided to step in.

The problem is this comes a little bit too little, too late.

The Peruvian government took eight months to schedule the first dialogue meeting.

It happened in Cusco in July of twenty twenty four.

There, a government official told Cecilio and Flavio to quote hug it out.

The next month, the government held a second meeting, and Marcello's reporting shows it was even less successful.

A video of the meeting shows a fight nearly erupting and Cecilio walking out of the meeting midway through.

Before he did, he emphasized his view that the community was going to retain full contry of Rainbow Mountain and whoever disagreed with him could press charges.

After the meeting, tensions at Rainbow Mountain kept escalating.

A local public safety official contacted the Cusco police multiple times, asking for more officers on the ground to keep villagers and tourists safe.

After Cecilio and Flavio came home from that August meeting in Cusco, the official reported another confrontation between their camps, but when officers showed up, a mob of about seventy people scattered.

There were no signs of violence, so the police left.

This is happening like on private land, on a tourism site operated by what amounts to a private company, which is an indigenous community, so the state is not really involved in any way.

And this is also happening at the intersection of an impoverished indigenous community which has had very little state presence in the past.

So there's no police station there, there's no hospit there.

And while the government is involved, its involvement is not direct enough to actually have an impact on what is happening on the ground.

And so this culminates on a fateful night in August of twenty twenty four.

From what we've been able to reconstruct, both through legal documents and through interviews with witnesses who were at the scene, Flavio and a few relatives were getting ready to go to a wedding, and to get to that wedding, they actually had to go through the road that they had helped build to Rainbow Mountain, except they were going in the opposite direction, and because Rainbow Mountain is a destination that is mostly frequented by tourists in the morning, by the afternoon they are no more tourists.

And so it is around this time that Flavier is in the motorcycle going down to another town to attend this wedding when he's ambushed.

Flavi on his relatives allegedly by a mob of about seventy people made up of his own neighbors or other members of this village.

They kidnapped them allegedly, and then Flavio ends up being killed.

Flavio was found stoned to death.

His relatives survived, and two of them shared details of the attack with Marcello.

What happened to Flavio was just the most tragic result possible of what had started it as the great hope of Rainbow Mountain, the great hope that tourism would transform and make this community better for generations to come.

Marcello says.

It's made many members of the community see Rainbow Mountain not as their miracle to get out of poverty, but as a curse.

Those factions did not exist before the money came in, and it was just this influx of money and the struggles to properly manage how much money was coming in for the benefit of everybody, and the lack of finding a mechanism for a proper oversight, whether within themselves or with the help of the state, that led to this tragic result.

Thirteen people have been sent to jail for their alleged role in killing Flavio and kidnapping his family.

They all deny wrongdoing.

The prosecutors acknowledge that they don't actually know who may have thrown the particular stone that ultimately killed Flavia, but they suspect that all these people participated in the mob.

And one of the people detained right now is Cecilio, who was president of chiji Wani at the moment of Flavio's killing.

In response to the allegations against him, Cecilio and his defense have said he was nowhere close to the attack, but rather in a neighboring village.

For now, the community of Chijuani has settled into an uneasy piece.

There haven't been any more altercations in the root Rambo mountain, but there also hasn't been a long term solution of any sort.

There are state organizations trying to broker one, but there hasn't been a proper resolution to this.

You spoke with some of Flavio's family members, including his son and his mother.

How do they feel about Rainbow Mountain and all that it's brought now?

I think it's really hard for them to even go to Rainbow Mountain.

It's a place that recalls a lot of grief for them.

But even they they recognize the benefits that Rainbow Mountain has also brought.

And they're not calling for the shutdown of Rainbomante or anything.

They're not telling tourists not to come.

Flavia's family very much wants Flavio to be remembered, to be associated with Rainbow Mountain and for tourists to ask who was Flavio Iyatinko and why did he have to die?

But most of the tourists who come to Rainbow Mountain don't know Flavio's story.

I think tourists sometimes overlook that they are not just visiting a mountain.

They're visiting an area where people live, where families live, and tourism has consequences both good and bad and that as a tourist you need to be aware of what those are.

So in this case, in the case of Rainbow Mountain in particular, you're bringing desperately needed money impoverished community.

But what to it sometimes overlook is like, what is happening with that money?

Is that money being used mainly for the benefit of everybody or who gets to control that money?

And is there any transparency behind how that money is being used?

And it's also a lesson for the Provian state that it should do more to ensure that it can meet its obligations to protect the Peruvian people.

One thing that has been happening is that there are new rainbow mountains popping up in the Pervian handy.

So it turns out that this rainbow mountain is not the only one.

Common as to explore this alternative rainbow mountain on your own, a rainbow montagine here in Peru that nobody seems to know about just is beautiful, a bit different, and you'll likely be the only people there.

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.

I'm Sarah Holder.

To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all Bloomberg dot Com subscribe today at bloomberg dot com Slash podcast offer.

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Thanks for listening.

We'll be back tomorrow