Peru · Food / Tobacco / Drink Processing (mineral extraction and food-salt production)
Salineras de Maras; individual pools are called pozos
The communal harvesting of table salt from a terraced network of thousands of shallow, hand-built evaporation pools cut into a mountainside in Peru's Sacred Valley, fed by a naturally salt-rich spring. Water is channeled pool by pool through a shared canal system, left to evaporate over roughly three days per fill, and the resulting salt crust is scraped, dried, and graded by hand. The system has operated continuously since at least the Early Horizon Period (1000-200 BCE), predating the Inca, and remains governed today by inherited family ownership of individual pools under a cooperative, reciprocity-based social structure known as ayni.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not inscribed on the Representative List; the site has been nominated by the Peruvian government and appears on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List (submitted 2019) under natural/cultural heritage criteria, distinct from the Intangible Cultural Heritage framework
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