Uros Floating Islands

The major attraction in Lake Titicaca consists of a group of islands –its number anywhere between 20 and 40–, hand-made from a native species of reed (totora) that abounds in the shallows of the lake. These islands are made and inhabited by the Uros people, who settled in the middle of the lake and started their strange lifestyle as a mean to avoid confrontations with the more powerful Collas and Incas. Uros, however, have long been intermarrying with Aymara Indians, so nowadays it would be more precise to refer to the families that inhabit the totora-reed islands as Uro-Aymaras.

The larger and most visited islands appear to many travellers as floating souvenirs, and to some extent these indeed are tourist-traps, their inhabitants having succeed in living off tourism. However, most of the smaller islands remain isolated from visitors and still practice a traditional way of life that includes old-technique fishing, bird-trapping, and relying on totora for housing and transportation.

Depending on the size of the island, three to ten Uros families live on each of them. The largest ones –Tribuna, Negrone, Chumi, Huacavacani, Tupiri, Titino, Tinajero– have schools, public telephones, souvenir shops, and even a Seventh-Day Adventist church. The smaller islands, on the contrary, are not equipped to receive visitors. Maintenance of the islands, located some 5 km west of the Puno harbour, involves a permanent, non-stop process: as the reeds from the bottoms rot away, fresh new ones are being cut and fed to the islands.

The islands can be visited by a quick tour from Puno that take less than half an hour to reach the islands. Tours are inexpensive (around $6) and take some 3 hours. In alternative, you could take a longer tour, that includes also the natural islands of Amantaní and Taquile.

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