Lake Titicaca sits 11,500 feet above sea level between Peru and Bolivia. It is the largest lake in South America, covering 3,305 square miles, and it is the highest navigable lake in the world. But one of the strangest things about this lake is not its position or size, but a group of people who’ve learned to live on top of the lake over the last few centuries.
Hundreds of years ago around the perimeter of Lake Titicaca a group of people known as the Uro wanted to escape the warring Inca and Colla tribes, so they thatched together local totura reeds and built themselves floating reed islands. Today there are over forty islands remaining on the lake, some islands half the size of football fields. When the roots of the reed at the bases of the islands begin to rot, the people add more layers of fresh totura reed on top.
The islands are stable and anchored in place by ropes attached to sticks driven into the bottom of the lake. On these islands the people live in huts made out of reed, fish in boats made out of reeds, grow crops such as potatoes and graze cattle on the surface which is said to be somewhat spongy to walk on.
Each reed island normally lasts about thirty years, but they might not even last that long today. Because of commercial fishing and sewage from local towns, the people of the islands are finding it harder and harder to survive. In fact most of the several thousand Uro descendants have moved to the mainland; only a few hundred people maintain and inhabit the floating islands today.
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