The Mindblowing Pre-Inca Salt Pools At Maras, Peru
The town of Maras can be found 40 kilometers north of Cuzco in Peru, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The town is famous for its nearby salt evaporation ponds which have been in use since Inca times. Thousands of asymmetrical square-shaped ponds stretch in the slopes of the hillside less than a kilometer west of the town. These pre-Inca salt pools were built during the Chanapata culture from AD 200 to AD 900. Extremely salty water emerging from the Qoripujio spring, near the head of the valley, is directed into a complex network of small channels constructed so that the water runs slowly down onto a couple of hundred prehistoric terraced bonds. Nearly all the ponds are less than four meters square in the region, and none of them exceeds thirty centimeters in depth. The flow of water is delicately controlled and kept track of by the workers. The altitude of the ponds gradually decreases, so that the water may flow through the multitude of branches of the water-supply channels and be introduces slowly through a dent in one sidewall of every pond.
When water starts to evaporate in the arid Andean air, it gets supersaturated and salt precipitates as different size crystals onto the inner surfaces of a pond's earthen walls and floor. After that, the pond's keeper closes the water-feeder dent and allows the water to completely evaporate.
A couple of days after that, the keeper delicately scrapes the dry salt from the sides and bottom, puts it into a suitable vessel, reopens the water-supply dent, and stores the salt elsewhere.
These salt ponds are traditionally allotted to the residents of Maras that would like to harvest salt.
It's possible to find a lot of unused salt pools available to be farmed, for the most part. Anyone that is willing to harvest salt only needs to locate an available pool, consult with the local informal cooperative, learn how to maintain a pool properly within the accepted communal system, and start working.
