What’s this?

There are a few other Inca sites that we visited around the Sacred Valley and they’re not all rocks. One is still being used today for the same purpose as it was initially constructed. We drove back towards Cusco, through the beautiful green valley towards a snow capped range shrouded in mist, then up onto a high plain before rounding a corner and heading steeply down into another valley, where the above sight came into view.

Nothing like we’d seen before, but a lot of work’s been done here!

Worth a closer look.

The Incas were masters in the art of terracing. We have seen it all through our travels in Peru, but never like this!

The Salinas de Maras salt mines were constructed by the Incas and are still in use today. Families apparently own a number of ‘plots’ each and harvest and sell the salt. Looks like extremely hard work!

A very salty stream runs out of the hill above the workings and is channeled cleverly into the plots and then left to dry out before the top layer of salt is harvested. Plots are in all different stages of evaporation and you can walk around and between them, marvelling at the work that is still being done 500 years later!