Lake Titicaca
The highest navigable lake in the world, high in the Andes
At 3,812 metres above sea level, Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world and the largest in South America — a vast, cobalt expanse cupped between the snow peaks of the Andes on the Peru-Bolivia border. Sacred to the peoples of the Altiplano, it is, in Inca tradition, the birthplace of the sun and the cradle of their civilisation. On its surface float the famous reed islands of the Uros, hand-built from totora reeds, while around it lie terraced fields and pre-Columbian ruins older than the Inca themselves.
Titicaca fills part of the endorheic Altiplano basin, spreading across 8,372 square kilometres and reaching a maximum depth of about 281 metres off the island of Isla del Sol's northern neighbour. At such altitude the air is thin and the nights cold, yet the lake's great mass moderates the climate of its shores enough to allow farming where the surrounding plateau is too harsh. Dozens of rivers feed it, yet only one small river, the Desaguadero, drains it southward, with the rest of its water lost to the intense high-altitude evaporation.
The lake anchored the Tiwanaku civilisation, whose ruins stand near its southern shore, and later the Inca, who built temples on its islands. Today its waters sustain Aymara and Quechua communities who fish, raise livestock, and farm its terraces much as their ancestors did, even as pollution from the growing cities of Puno and El Alto and the introduction of non-native trout strain the ecosystem and its endemic species, including the giant Titicaca water frog. Steamships once hauled across these waters, and the lake remains a working highway and a living heart of the Andes.