The mysterious Andean city in the sky, Tiwanaku

At 12,500 feet in the Andes Mountains, the air is clear and cold. On a spring day, during the rainy season, clouds can blanket the sky and make the area look even more bleak.

Yet, above the tree line, tucked into the Altiplano – a high, flat, barren plain that stretches below the deep blue sky at the crest of the mountains – there’s an ancient city that once thronged with up to 20,000 people and held sway over parts of Bolivia, where it’s located, and into Argentina, Chile and Peru. It was the most important pilgrimage site in the Andes, and one of the largest Pre-Columbian cities in South America.

Not many people go to see it; tours usually stop on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca and don’t cross over into Bolivia. That’s unfortunate, because they miss setting foot on one of the greatest mysteries of the continent: Tiwanaku.

But around 1000 A.D. it fell apart, its inhabitants scattering across the landscape.

The doldrums of winter in Canada give me wanderlust every year. I don’t mind the season, but when the days are all grey in succession and a frigid polar vortex keeps us trapped inside, I start to think about adventure in warmer climes. It began many years ago when the weather was particularly dreary and I tried out a recipe for Moroccan lemon & cinnamon chicken with couscous. I’d never cooked anything ‘exotic’ before, although we’d eaten Middle Eastern and Asian foods in restaurants, and the warmth and sunshine embodied in that meal was the perfect antidote on that cold January day. A trend was born.

I’ve always been interested in archeology as well – the mysteries behind stunning ruins like the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, Machu Picchu. I try to imagine, from details that researchers have pieced together through remnants in written records and clues left in the ruins, what it must have been like to live back then.

Among my many books on archeology and ancient civilizations, quite a few years ago I stumbled across photos of a remote, enigmatic place high in the Andes mountains, about which little seemed to be known. But the few images taken by early researchers were fascinating, especially the massive construction called the Sun Gate. The ancient ruin was called Tiahuanaco, or Tiwanaku. Not nearly as famous as other temples, citadels or cultures scattered around Peru, but that only added to the allure. I hoped one day to be able to see it in person.

That adventure finally materialized a few years ago, when I found a three-week tour to Peru and Bolivia that included a visit to Tiwanaku. I think I may have been more excited about that than even seeing Machu Picchu. The latter is so ridiculously famous that as you climb the path to get there, there’s an element of ‘will it live up to all its hype’? But Tiwanaku – that was like being in an Indiana Jones movie, or The Lost World tale by Arthur Conan Doyle! No treacherous guides, hostile jungle tribes or dinosaurs to worry about (at least we hoped), but the wonder of going somewhere hardly anyone else ever had.

Little was still known about Tiwanaku when we visited it – even our local guide didn’t have a lot of information. Less than 10% of the estimated total site had been excavated. But I’m delighted to say that more has been accomplished since then, opening a long-buried window on a remarkable civilization that managed to make a home in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on earth.

In fact, this post was inspired by a short film I saw recently on the BBC website: Tiwanaku: The civilisation that mysteriously disappeared. “The Tiwanaku civilisation, which precedes the Inca civilisation and has a lifespan of 25 centuries, is known as the ‘mother culture’ of South America. The civilisation mysteriously vanished without a trace. There are numerous theories, but recent findings have shed light on the truth of what may have happened and the significance of this cultural mystery.”

Tiwanaku is located in the Altiplano, a high, arid plateau in the Andes where not much grows except the stiff clumps of serrated beige grass that vicuñas feed on.

Rather ironically, the largest lake in South America, Lake Titicaca, lies within the plateau, with five major river systems feeding into it. The average altitude in this oxygen-deprived part of the world is 12,300 feet. Just for context, the city of Toronto sits at only 250 feet above sea level, and the highest town in Canada is Lake Louise, Alberta at only 5,200 feet.

Visiting the Altiplano takes some prep – our low-altitude bodies take time to get used to breathing in such rarified air. Most people think that there’s less oxygen at high altitudes, but it’s actually the air pressure that’s much lower, which means that our lungs have to work much harder to take in the amount of oxygen our organs need to work properly.

People, and animals, who live at high altitudes are naturally acclimated; for the rest of us, we need several days of gradual ascent, plenty of rest, and stimulants like carbohydrates and caffeine to give our metabolisms a boost. (Before I set up the eight-person tour we embarked on, I did a great deal of research on acclimation and possible high-altitude illnesses.) Coca leaf tea and candies are readily available in every town and hotel – this is the plant that cocaine is derived from, but there’s not enough of the active ingredient in the small, bay-shaped leaves to provide a buzz. They’re also excellent for high-altitude nausea.

So why would anyone choose to live at such altitudes, where the air is thin and cold, and little grows? Numerous cultures have done so, including the Uros, the ‘Reed People’ who still live on floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca. The totora reed that grows so readily in the lake is used to construct their islands, assemble their huts on the island, treat fever, and many other functions.

According to archeological records, people first started to live in this region around 8,000 BCE. They were somewhat nomadic, living in temporary camps while they hunted the wild animals like guanaco and vicuña. Lake Titicaca also had plenty of fish and waterfowl, and gradually settlements began to spring up around the shore.

By 400 CE, Tiwanaku had become the largest and most important site in the Titicaca Basin, an expansive,  diverse city at the centre of a large network of neighbouring cultures. By around 800 CE it reached its peak, with a population of between 10,000 to 20,000 people. The rulers controlled their populace by throwing large work feasts to build monuments, bringing in trade caravans and thousands of pilgrims.

The city was inhabited by both wealthy and regular people, with houses were arranged in neighborhoods. The richer neighborhoods were closer to the centre of the city, in a palace called the Putuni. Those homes were adorned with paint, and had a sophisticated drainage system to remove dirty water. Remnants of beautiful pottery and decorative objects made of silver and copper have been found.

The less wealthy lived on the edge of the city. The houses had kitchens, patios, and space for the family’s domesticated animals, including alpacas and guinea pigs (the latter are still a delicacy raised for special feasts in Peru to this day).

The Tiwanaku people were brilliant agriculturalists, raising crops in an environment that seems impossible. Despite the intense nightly cold and frosts, brief rainy season and threat of floods, and depletion of an already less-fertile soil, they successfully raised a variety of crops (especially potatoes and quinoa), by constructing raised fields lined with ditches where rain water could flow for irrigation and dissipate if too high. The raised beds also created a warmer microclimate that kept the crops from freezing. The Tiwanakan farmers were so successful that, during the city’s heyday 1,500 years ago, it was a breadbasket area capable of supporting 125,000 people.

Today most of the city is buried under the reddish soil of the area. Only a handful of ritual buildings are visible, offering tantalizing hints of what the site must once have been – the stepped Akapana Pyramid, a large rectangular enclosure known as the Kalasasaya, and the Semi-Subterranean Temple studded with heads that are believed to represent all the conquered cultures.

The Kalasasaya contains the imposing Gateway of the Sun, carved in great detail with strange figures, which the Inca believed represented Viracocha, the Creator God. The portal-like structure is made of a single piece of stone weighing approximately 10 tons – which begs the question ‘How on earth did the Tiwanakans transport the massive monolith to the site, and raise it into position’? The average car today weighs around 2 tons, not even a quarter of the huge stone, and would need something like a crane to move it. There are numerous other statues similarly challenging to put into place.

If you watch the video, you’ll learn that the ancient people of Tiwanaku had another trick up their sleeve: they knew how to use chemical reactions from plants to actually soften stone and manipulate it. This information is from extensive research, not ‘Ancient Alien’ speculation – although one might wonder where the inhabitants got such knowledge 10,000 years ago. Adjacent to the main Tiwanaku site, the area known as Puma Punku has many architectural anomalies that have led many people to speculate about the involvement of an advanced, probably alien race. Whatever theory you might believe, Tiwanaku is a tantalizing doorway into a world long forgotten.

In Aymara legends, Tiwanaku was the literal centre of the earth, at the convergence of the moist eastern, agricultural, female lands, which were considered ‘terrestrial’, and the dry western, pastoral male lands that were ‘celestial’. Lake Titicaca (which was once much closer than it is now) was the place where Viracocha, the Sun, emerged and created a new world order. The entire centre of the city was surrounded by a moat, signifying a sacred island that existed in liminal time and space, i.e. the transition point between regular life and the divine. 

But despite all the physical and spiritual power and wealth, the leaders of Tiwanaku were overthrown only 200 years after their civilization peaked, around 1000 CE. Over 200 years after that, a new political power base, called the Inca, began to expand from their base in Cuzco, and became the dominant civilization of the Andes region  until they were destroyed by the Spanish.

So what happened?

Unfortunately the people of Tiwanaku didn’t keep written records (or at least none have yet been found). There are a variety of theories, from environmental disaster to political revolt. The answers are perhaps buried under the 90% of unexcavated ground, waiting to reveal themselves one day to our wonder and amazement.