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Puno | Lake Titicaca | History
Lake Titicaca is the world's highest navigable lake covering an area of 8000 square kilometres and it is 170 kilometres long and 65 kilometres wide.
The mighty lake straddles the border of Bolivia and Peru and is dotted with dozens of islands, each of them with their own characteristics and peculiarities. The floating islands of the Uros, whose inhabitants descend from one of the oldest known tribes in the Americas, feature typical native huts made from reeds. |
The inhabitants of Taquile island, meanwhile, still use traditional weaving techniques that tourists can learn if they decide to stay the night there and accept the traditional hospitality of the locals.
What we see today is just the vestige of what was once a huge inland body of water, known to geologists as the Humboldt Sea. This great sea covered what is now the altiplano, from La Raya to Uyuni, and lakes like Poopó and Coipasa in Bolivia are, quite literally, the puddles it left behind as it evaporated. These continue to be fed by rivers, nourished in turn by the melt waters of the Andes.
This immense body of water was formed by tectonic movements. When the Nasca plate met the Andes plate the latter was pushed up to form the world’s longest mountain chain and between its eastern and western ranges, what was once the ocean floor became the altiplano, covered still by sea water.
Today, Titicaca has a salt content of just 0.1% and is designated a fresh water lake. Five rivers drain into the lake and just one flows out. This river, the Desaguadero, carries some of Titicaca’s waters far to the south-east, where they form the salt flats of Uyuni and Coipasa, thus, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni continues to grow as Lake Titicaca shrinks.
However, Titicaca loses most of its water through evaporation and it is this process which, over millennia, is causing the lake to disappear. Just eight thousand years ago, Titicaca was 10 metres deeper than it is now and this process of extinction seems to have accelerated in recent years.
Click here to find out about the History of Lake Titicaca. |
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