In the Peruvian Andes, communities use nature, science and history to maximize every drop of water in one of the world’s driest places.
On an October morning in the Peruvian Andes, the sound of chisels striking against stone rings bright in the thin mountain air. Here, some 12,500 feet above sea level, a crew of a dozen people works from a makeshift camp—a cluster of tents pitched amid the rock and grass on an ankle-twisting hillside high above the Santa Eulalia river.
The landscape is, in turns, raked by the blazing sun and swept by frigid wind and clouds. The crew labors forward, digging a trench in the soil with pickaxes and shovels and then carefully setting stones in place for reinforcement, slowly extending a 1.5-foot-wide canal across the mountainside.
Their work has roots that reach back over a millennium, and builds on the nearly vanished traces of pre-Incan canals known as “amunas.”
Read the story published in November 2024 in The Nature Conservancy
