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Andenes in the Sacred Valley at Pisac, Peru Diagram of Inca engineering of andenes. An andén (plural andenes), Spanish for "platform", [1] is a stair-step like terrace dug into the slope of a hillside for agricultural purposes. The term is most often used to refer to the terraces built by pre-Columbian cultures in the Andes mountains of South ...
There are at least 14 different shapes of terrace at heights from 2,995 metres (9,826 ft) to 3,450 metres (11,320 ft) metres above sea level. Many are still in use today. The terraces closest to modern Písac are the Andenes Acchapata, which consist of up of 40 individual terraces which extend down to the valley floor and the river.
Agricultural Andenes or terraces in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, close to Pisac, Peru.. Inca agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin.
Side valleys and agricultural terraces expand the cultivatable area. [4] The valley was formed by the Urubamba river, also known as the Vilcanota River, Willkanuta River (Aymara, "house of the sun") or Willkamayu . The latter, in Quechua, the still spoken lingua franca of the Inca Empire, [5] means the sacred river. It is fed by numerous ...
In the South American Andes, farmers have used terraces, known as andenes, for over a thousand years to farm potatoes, maize, and other native crops. Terraced farming was developed by the Wari culture and other peoples of the south-central Andes before 1000 AD, centuries before they were used by the Inca, who adopted them. The terraces were ...
Noted American archeologist Ephraim George Squier noted several aqueducts during his exploration of Peru in the late 1800s, including those that watered gardens on the terraces of the Yucay or Sacred Valley, north of Cuzco. He also recorded an account of the ruins of a sixty-foot-high aqueduct in the foothills of the Andes near Lima. [4]
The term Interandean valles refers to those valleys located in the Andes mountains. The interandean valles comprise most of the mid-elevation areas of the "sierra" of Peru, "los valles" of Bolivia and the "Cuyo region" of Argentina. In Colombia the main interandean valles are formed by Magdalena River and its affluent, the Cauca River.
The Central Andes run up the center of the country between the Cauca and Magdalena river valleys (to the west and east respectively) and includes the cities of Medellín, Manizales and Pereira. The East Andes extend northeast towards the Guajira Peninsula , and includes the cities of Bogotá , Bucaramanga and Cúcuta .