The Sacred Valley, 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.

The Inca terraces cut into the hillsides of the Sacred Valley are the most visible sign of a civilisation that understood engineering and ecology together, transforming steep Andean slopes into land productive enough to sustain a whole empire. At Moray, that understanding goes further still. A set of huge circular terraces, stepping down into the earth like a natural amphitheatre, is believed to have functioned as an Inca agricultural laboratory, its rings creating different microclimates so that crops from the coast, the highlands and the Amazon could all be trialled in a single site.

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

No frame included.