A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
puna
The puna is the high dry grassland of the central Andes, above the treeline and above the paramo belt, running through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina at 12,000 feet and higher. It is cold, bright, and arid, with tussock grass, cushion plants, salt flats, and enormous distances. Vicuña, guanaco, viscacha, and flamingos live on it, and it is the ground the altiplano occupies.
Etymology
The word is Quechua and Aymara and means high ground or a cold place, and in Andean Spanish it also means altitude sickness, so to be sick with the puna is to be sick from the height.
Notes
The puna is drier and colder than the paramo, which occupies the same elevation band further north where the rainfall is higher, and the difference between the two is one of the sharpest vegetation boundaries in South America. Cushion plants on the puna grow so slowly and so densely that a mound the size of a car can be several thousand years old.