Sillustani

On the grassy slopes above Lake Umayo, high on the Peruvian Altiplano, stand the stone burial towers of Sillustani. Some are squat and ruined, others rise as tall, carefully dressed stone cylinders, and against the wide blue of the lake and the bare hills of the plateau they form one of the most haunting funerary landscapes in the Andes.

These towers, known as chullpas, were built to hold the dead above ground rather than below it. Each one sheltered the remains of an entire family group, most likely of noble rank, laid in a crouched, foetal position; the cold, dry air of the plateau preserved many of the bodies naturally. The doorways are small and almost always face east, towards the rising sun. The builders were the Qulla, an Altiplano people who were probably Puquina speakers, and the tradition of tower burial in the region reaches back to the Tiwanaku period of the later first millennium. In the fifteenth century the Inca conquered the Qulla, and some of the finest chullpas show the hand of the newcomers: older cores were faced with precisely fitted Inca masonry, producing towers up to about 12 metres high. A few blocks carry carved animal figures.

Not every tower was finished. Several still have the earthen ramps that were used to haul stones into place, which gives Sillustani a rare view of how these monuments were actually raised. Others were blasted open by treasure hunters in later centuries, leaving the fallen stones scattered across the slope. Despite those losses, the site is regarded as the best preserved group of chullpas on the Altiplano, and parts of it were restored in 2005 under the archaeologist Eduardo Arizaca Medina.

Getting there

Sillustani lies on the shore of Lake Umayo in the Puno Region of southern Peru, about 20 km in a straight line from the city of Puno. The nearest airport is Inca Manco Cápac International Airport (JUL) at Juliaca, about 28 km away.