As you stand on a hill in the town of Maras in Peru, you can’t stop but notice steps that are carved out of a hillside in the shape of square ponds. Bright sunlight from the clear skies high up in Andean mountains reflects off of shallow water in these ponds creating vivid images. Maybe this water is collected in ponds for farming purposes but the soil doesn’t seem to be too fertile. It’s almost white in color and you also wonder that it is very hard to grow anything at over 9,000 feet above sea level because there is hardly any vegetation around. So, what exactly are the people in Maras trying to do by collecting water in ponds and what’s up with white soil? But a careful examination reveals that the white stuff is not actually soil. It’s salt and it is the product that is being harvested from these ponds. The idea is simple. You collect water in shallow ponds. Bright Sun throughout the day evaporates the water and what remains is the salt that was present in water. Simple enough but Salted water at 9,000 feet above sea level? Seawater has a lot of salt content and some places like the Dead Sea has so much salt content that you can literally float in the water without drowning. But mountains don’t have sea water. Yet, in this small village town of Maras, salt is harvested at 9000 feet above sea level even though the nearest ocean is thousands of miles away.

According to a legend, when farmers in the local community stopped worshipping the mountain god - Chicon, apparently Chicon got very angry and he converted the rain-water into salted water to punish the people in this town. They were no longer able to grow their crops. Chicon wanted people to start worshipping him. But Maras folks had a different idea. As the salted rain fell on these Andean mountains, it flowed down in the form of streams and village people started collecting it in ponds and started making salt that they will sell to other towns and earn their livelihood.

This makes it an interesting story but the real answer lies in the way Andean mountains evolved over tens of millions of years ago. These mountains were formed when two tectonic plates collided. One of the plates - Oceanic Crust collided with Continental Crust and went underneath the continental crust. This caused the mountain range to form but also the salt water present in the sea got trapped in the form of lakes in many areas. Water eventually evaporated but salt remained high up in mountains. As rain falls and flows down in the form of streams, it gets mixed with salt minerals and this is what people in the town of Maras collect.

Human ingenuity indeed has no limits and these saltwater ponds in Maras show that humans know how to adapt, survive and use natural resources around them in most productive ways.

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