A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
altiplano
The high plateau of the central Andes, where the range is at its widest and splits into two cordilleras with a floor between them. It runs roughly a thousand kilometers from southern Peru through Bolivia into Chile and Argentina at an average of about 3,750 meters, and it is the most extensive high plateau on earth outside Tibet. It is also endorheic — the water has no outlet to the sea, so it collects in Lake Titicaca, pools into salt flats like Uyuni and Coipasa, or simply evaporates.
Etymology
Spanish, from alto (high) and plano (plain) — flatly descriptive, and laid over a name much older. In Quechua and Aymara the region is Qullaw, the place of the Qulla, the people who were there before the Inca and long before Spain; Spanish speakers still use collao alongside altiplano. The Latin root of alto is altus, which meant both high and deep depending on whether you were looking up or down — a useful ambiguity on a plain that is a basin and a summit at the same time.
Notes
At the end of the Pleistocene, most of the altiplano lay under one enormous lake; Titicaca and the salt flats are what is left of it. The brines under the salt flats hold a large share of the world’s known lithium. Vicuña run wild on the high grassland, and their fleece is the finest animal fiber there is.