Incan Salt Farms – Salineras, Sacred Valley, Peru

A distant shot of the salt farms of Salineras – the scale of this really takes your breathe away when you first sea. Carved into a valley, surrounded by green mountains; there are some 3,000 salt pans in total, all cleverly irrigated and feeding off a small salt water spring,  remnants of a long lost sea. Originally built by the Incas some 600 years ago, these were later expanded by the Spanish through slavery but today the salt farms are each individually owned, direct inheritance from their slave ancestors though still operating much as they also have.  Given it was rainy season, they are a little brown and minimally worked – this becomes a sea of white in dry season and a hive of activity, but impressive all the same!