Visit These Floating Peruvian Islands Constructed From Plants
Visit These Floating Peruvian Islands Constructed From Plants
The Uro people who live on Lake Titicaca have been building their own villages by hand for centuries
By Michele Lent Hirsch
smithsonian.com
August 13, 2015
For a lesson on adaptability, consider the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. The Uro people have constructed the islands out of the totora plant for hundreds of years, forming their own homeland in a lake that sits high in the Andes mountains, straddling Peru and Bolivia. With constant work, the plant allows them to build floating villages where previously there was only.
The practice began in the pre-Columbian era, when the ancestors of the Uro couldn’t find land of their own amid competing groups—including the Colla and the Inca—and needed a way to protect themselves. So they created islands in Lake Titicaca out of thick totora reeds. Today, the Uro continue to live on islands made out of the reeds, and use the same material to make houses and furniture. “Originally,” Atlas Obscura writes, “the mobility of the islands was used as a defense mechanism,” allowing villagers to move if things got tense.
Now, the roughly 70 human-designed pieces of land, each measuring about 50 feet by 50 feet, are usually moored, tied to the bottom of the water and to each other with rope cables, but their inhabitants can move them around the lake if needed. There is a watchtower on one island as well as several smaller outhouse islands, and the main island also boasts a radio station.
Until the mid-1980s, most of the islands were located about nine miles from shore and had few visitors. But after a devastating storm in 1986, as Slate writes, many Uros rebuilt their islands near Puno, the largest city on the shore of the lake. Now that the islands are easier to access, tourists come by the hundreds of thousands. Locals take turns opening up their homes to show what it’s like to live in a building made of reeds, and also don native costumes for the sightseers. Eighty percent of the local population works in tourism. But at about 12,500 feet above sea level, Lake Titicaca has only about 65 percent of the oxygen many visitors are used to—so locals, as in other elevated parts of Peru, offer coca tea to alleviate symptoms of altitude sickness.
More:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/people-peru-live-manmade-islands-constructed-plants-180956218/#Tqf81HRbUjm2LzK8.99
