The islands built to disappear

Here's the Lake Titicaca story that I think about every time reed boats come up. Around 500 years ago, as the Inca empire expanded rapidly and began swallowing up smaller communities nearby, the Uros people came up with an unusual way to escape it. They wove entire islands out of totora reeds and anchored them out on the lake itself, floating platforms sturdy enough to build houses, boats, even a church and a school on.

The reeds rot slowly from underneath, which means the islands need constant rebuilding from the top down, a maintenance job that has effectively never stopped in five hundred years. The Uros still live on these islands today, descendants of people who originally built them purely to put open water between themselves and an empire they wanted no part of.

I painted the boats on the water in watercolour and ink. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Lake Titicaca, Peru · Travel Poster