Maras

Maras is salt. On a mountainside above the Sacred Valley, a single warm spring of salty water is channelled into several thousand shallow terraced ponds, and the sun does the rest: the water evaporates, the salt crusts white and cream and pale pink, and families who have worked the same ponds for generations scrape it up. Our Maras cap is the salt-pink stripe, a rainbow-family cloth turned to the quiet end of its range.

The salt pans

The Salineras de Maras have been worked since before the Inca. The spring comes out of the hill already saline, having passed through an underground salt deposit, and the ponds step down the slope in a patchwork that changes colour with the season and the drying: bright white after the harvest, pink and ochre as the brine sits. Each pond belongs to a household in the village of Maras on the plateau above. The salt is sold coarse and pink, and in the last few years, to the world.

Moray and the plateau

The plateau above the salt pans is high and open, 3,300 metres, wheat and potatoes and a big sky. A few kilometres away is Moray, a set of concentric circular terraces sunk into a natural bowl, which the Inca may have used to test crops at different temperatures. Chinchero, the weaving village, is on the same plateau. It is the most textile-dense corner of the whole valley.

The cap named Maras

The Maras is a curved-brim ball cap in a full handwoven salt-pink Andean stripe with teal chakana embroidery, one of the ball caps in the rainbow family, K'uychi, but the palest of them. Its valley neighbours are the Urubamba and the Písac.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · Tacna · La Paz · El Alto · Copacabana · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear and bags, and the cloth families on the weaves.