The Salt Pans Of Salinas, Peru

Salinas Salt Pans (Sacred Valley in the background)

We drove along a dusty road high above the Sacred Valley, on our way to visit Salinas, the intricately-terraced, salt pans which have produced hundreds of pounds of salt every month since before the time of the Incas. We slowly bumped along a dusty road lined with large cacti and admired the snow-capped Andes. I’d seen photos of the brilliant-white salt pans but at this moment nothing in this landscape dominated by glaciers, dust and cacti looked remotely like the image in my mind.


We took a left turn and started to descend into a small narrow valley feeding directly into the Vilcanote River and the Sacred Valley of the Incas. With each hairpin turn we lowered into the valley until the salt pans came into view: a couple-thousand, large and bright-white salt pools, cascading and melting down the side of an otherwise brown valley. From the distance, it was as if someone slathered white icing on the sides of the valley with an overloaded cake spatula. We finally arrived and parked near the entrance to the site.

Up close, we could appreciate the engineering details of the centuries-old salt extraction technique. The pools are fed by salty, subterranean water from deep within the mountain plateau. Intricate canals direct the water from pool to pool, allowing the sun to evaporate the water (is it any wonder the Incas worshipped the sun?) and leave thick layers of salt to be extracted by humans. The entire process from filling a pool to extracting salt takes about a month.

We hiked along a path in the middle of the terraces, stopping to admire the pools and allowing our kids to give the salty water a taste. We watched workers with large plastic pans scoop the salt from the dry pools in the hot sun. The pools are on average 250 square-feet in size and each one is a slightly different color depending on where it is in the evaporation process: from muddy brown to beige to off white to a brilliant, eye-popping white.

We spent about an hour walking around the site and climbed back up the narrow valley until we were back on the dusty plateau and on our way to Cusco. For me, the appeal of Salinas is the stark contrast between the salt pans and the surrounding landscape. The blinding white image of sun-dried salt set amongst an arid, dusty terrain is an image that will stay with me.