Cusco Peru wiki

Principal square of the town of Maras.

Maras is a city within the Sacred Valley associated with the Incas, 40 kilometers north of Cuzco, when you look at the Cuzco area of Peru. The town is well known for the nearby salt evaporation ponds, used since Inca times. The salt-evaporation ponds are up-slope, not as much as a kilometer west of town.

Location and features[edit]

Coordinates:

The Maras area is available by a paved roadway, which leads from the main roadway leading through the Sacred Valley between Cuzco and the surrounding cities. Tourist web sites in your community include the colonial chapel, the local salt evaporation ponds, and surrounding views.

Salt ponds[edit]

Since pre-Inca times, sodium has been gotten in Maras by evaporating salty liquid from a nearby subterranean stream. Ones highly salty water emerges at a spring, a normal outlet of this underground stream. The circulation is directed into an intricate system of small channels built so the liquid runs slowly down on the a few hundred old terraced ponds. Nearly all the ponds are significantly less than four yards square in location, and nothing surpasses thirty centimeters thorough. All are fundamentally shaped into polygons with all the flow of water very carefully managed and administered because of the workers. The altitude of ponds gradually reduces, so your water may move through the wide variety limbs of the water-supply channels and stay introduced slowly through a notch in one sidewall of every pond. The proper upkeep associated with adjacent feeder station, the side walls additionally the water-entry notch, the pond's bottom area, the number of water, and also the removal of accumulated sodium build up needs close cooperation one of the community of people. Its concurred among local residents and pond workers that cooperative system had been set up during the time of the Incas, if you don't previously. As liquid evaporates from sun-warmed ponds, the water becomes supersaturated and sodium precipitates as different dimensions crystals on the internal surfaces of a pond's earthen walls as well as on the pond's earthen flooring. The pond's keeper then closes the water-feeder notch and enables the pond going dry. In a few days the keeper very carefully scrapes the dry-salt from the edges and bottom, puts it into an appropriate vessel, reopens the water-supply notch, and carries away the salt. Colour of the sodium varies from white to a light reddish or brownish tan, with regards to the ability of someone employee. Some salt is sold at a present shop nearby.

The sodium mines traditionally are open to any person wishing to harvest salt. The people who own the sodium ponds must certanly be people in the city, and families being new to town wanting to propitiate a salt pond have the one farthest from neighborhood. The dimensions of the salt pond assigned to a family group is determined by your family's size. Typically there are many unused salt swimming pools open to be farmed. Any prospective salt farmer need only find a clear at this time unmaintained pond, talk to your local casual cooperative, learn to keep a pond precisely within the acknowledged communal system, and begin working.

Notable residents[edit]

1. Velarde, Teófilo Benavente, Alejandro Martínez Frisancho. El pintor de los angeles colonia Don Antonio Sinchi Rocca Inca. Cuzco, Peru: H.G. Rozas S.A., 1965.