Lake Titicaca, 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.

Around 500 years ago, as the Inca empire expanded and began swallowing up smaller communities, the Uros people responded by building somewhere the empire couldn't easily follow. They wove entire islands out of totora reeds and anchored them out on Lake Titicaca, floating platforms sturdy enough to live on, complete with reed houses, reed boats and even a reed church and school. The reeds slowly rot from below, so the islands need constant rebuilding from the top, a maintenance routine that has never really stopped in five centuries. The Uros still live there today, on islands their ancestors built purely to disappear.

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

No frame included.