Maras Salt Pans

Interesting facts

In the sixteenth century colonial records list descendants of the Inca nobility, among them Felipe Topa Yupanqui and Alonso Titu Atauchi, as owners of salt pans here.

A royal decree of 1591 launched a colonial survey that recorded how the salt pans were shared out among families.

By custom a newly joining family receives the pool farthest from the spring, and the size of a family's holding reflects the size of the family.

Each pool is filled, left to evaporate and scraped roughly once a month, so successive layers of salt build up through the dry season.

In 1969 Peru's government created the state salt company EMSAL and moved to take over salt production across the country, Maras included.

Counts of the pools vary widely, from about 3,000 to more than 5,000, partly because many disused ponds lie abandoned at the edges.

Why it is worth it

On a steep slope in the Peruvian Andes, about 3,200 metres above the sea, some 4,500 small pools step down the side of a ravine like a honeycomb poured over the hill. These are the salt pans of Maras. Each is roughly five square metres and only about thirty centimetres deep, and together they form a patchwork in shades of white, cream, ochre and brown that shifts with the season and the hour. From the viewpoint above, the terraces look less like an industry than a vast mosaic.

The source is a single saline spring rising at the head of the valley. Its water is led into a main channel and then divided through ever smaller channels from pool to pool; when a pond is full the inlet is closed and the sun does the rest, until a crust of salt can be scraped off by hand. The work is ancient. Archaeological finds suggest the springs were exploited long before the Spanish arrived, with pottery from the Killke culture and from the Inca period found on the site, and the pools are still worked in much the same way.

Today the pans belong to the families of the surrounding communities, roughly 400 of them, organised in a cooperative; each family's pools are passed down from one generation to the next. The best salt comes in the dry season from May to October, when it crystallises quickly and comes out white or faintly pink; in the rainy months the yield is slower and the salt darker. Different layers of the crust are sold for the kitchen, in bulk, or for farm and industrial use.

Not far away lies Moray, with its Inca agricultural terraces, and the two sites together show how thoroughly Andean people reshaped these slopes to their needs.

Getting there

The salt pans lie in Urubamba Province, about 9 km from the village of Maras, roughly 18 km from Urubamba and about 40 km by road from Cusco. Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport in Cusco (CUZ) is about 35 km away in a straight line. Colectivos running from Cusco towards Urubamba can drop passengers at the Maras turn-off, from where taxis cover the rest of the way; many visitors combine the salt pans with Moray on a single day trip.

Maras Salt Pans

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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