Colca Canyon, Peru · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Colca Canyon runs twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, carved by cultures who were terracing its slopes long before the Inca empire ever reached them. Its very name comes from the Inca word for storeroom, colca, after the food stores the Incas built into the valley walls to hold corn and potatoes for an entire region. The canyon vanished from outside attention for decades after its first scientific survey in 1931, only rediscovered in the 1980s when a group of Polish rafters stumbled onto it while roads were being built for a hydroelectric project. Andean condors, the largest flying bird on earth with a wingspan of up to three metres, still ride the thermals above it every morning.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.