A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
paramo
Paramo is the wet alpine grassland of the northern Andes, above the treeline and below the permanent snow, running through Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and northern Peru. It is cold, misty, and soaked, and it holds a strange flora built around tall unbranched rosette plants that stand like candelabra above the tussock grass and are insulated by their own dead leaves, which they never shed.
Etymology
The word is Spanish for a bleak high moor or wasteland, and it descends from a pre-Roman Iberian word. Spanish speakers arriving in the Andes applied a word from home to a landscape that resembled it in feel rather than in content, which is how a great deal of American Spanish landscape vocabulary works.
Notes
Paramo is the water tower of the northern Andes. The vegetation and the deep organic soil hold rain and mist and release it slowly, so a large share of the drinking water for Bogotá, Quito, and other cities comes off it. The rosette plants, called frailejones, grow a few centimeters a year and can be well over a century old at head height.