||1: The idea hasn’t won universal support. ||2: Although Montecristi is home to 500 or so weavers, the city of Cuenca in the southern Andes produces and exports most finished toquilla hats. There they worry that the Montecristi brand won’t much help them. ||3: “If a weaver from Manabí [Montecristi’s home province] for whichever reason moves to Cuenca, the hat he makes in Cuenca isn’t going to be worse than the one he weaves in Manab,” says Gabriela Molina of Homero Ortega, a family-owned hatmaker .