Maras is a town near the city of Cusco in the Sacred Valley of southeastern Peru. It’s known for the Maras Salt Mines, thousands of individual salt pools on a hillside, dating back to Incan times. West of the town is Moray, an Inca archaeological site on a high plateau featuring a series of concentric terraces. Surrounding trails offer views of the snow-capped Urubamba mountain range.
Since pre-Inca times, salt has been obtained in Maras by evaporating salty water from a local subterranean stream. The highly salty water emerges at a spring, a natural outlet of the underground stream. The flow is directed into an intricate system of tiny channels constructed so that the water runs gradually down onto the several hundred ancient terraced ponds. Almost all the ponds are less than four meters square in area, and none exceeds thirty centimeters in depth.
