The Last of the Incas

The vast Andean territory of plateaux and high valleys which forms the physical core of Peru and Bolivia is a land of harsh beauty and climatic rigour, where human welfare is, at best, unpredictable. On its slopes, where red volcanic earth often contrasts with the green-yellow of the prevalent ichu grass, trees were almost unknown until the eucalyptus, which now gives grace to many a formerly shadeless valley, was introduced at the end of the last century.

Even those domestic plants which are native to the region, such as the potato, the oca tuber and the quinoa grain, are so often destroyed by frost and drought that in some districts a crop every other year is a fair average. For this reason famines and near-famines have occurred with relative frequency in the centuries since the Spanish conquest; the most recent took place this year in the Altiplano around Lake Titicaca, and the fact that such extreme want should still be endemic in the Andean highlands is one measure of the loss which the Indians of Peru have suffered from the destruction of the Inca economy four centuries ago.