--- title: Happy News From South America: How One Peruvian Village Is Rebuilding the Andes' Lost Ice description: "Yasuní National Park has long held a strange distinction among the world's protected areas: it is simultaneously one of the most biologically rich places on the planet and one of the most contested. Researchers have documented world records here for tree, amphibian, reptile, and bat diversity: a single hectare of Yasuní forest can hold more tree species than the entire United States and Canada combined." image: https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hubfs/shutterstock_2037888599.jpg --- [![Avanti Destinations Logo](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png?width=100&height=63&name=Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png "Avanti Destinations Logo")](http://www.avantidestinations.com) [![Avanti Destinations Logo](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png?width=100&height=63&name=Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png "Avanti Destinations Logo")](http://www.avantidestinations.com) - [The Avanti Traveler](https://info.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler) - [Blog Homepage](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler) - [Avanti Podcast](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/avanti-podcast/the-avanti-podcast) - [Avanti Destinations](https://www.avantidestinations.com/home) - [Subscribe Now](https://share.hsforms.com/1FoJwsgeZQ366rRMQXb1RJQ158jk) search - There are no suggestions because the search field is empty. 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They also remember when the peaks above them wore ice and snow. Today much of that ice has given way to bare rock. Over roughly six decades, climate change has erased about 56% of Peru's glacier mass, removing a frozen reservoir that once fed the country's cities and desert farmland. Now a community of about 600 people in the Huancavelica region is trying to rebuild some of that lost storage. They are not using concrete. They are using trees, wetlands, and a way of thinking about water that is older than the Inca. A Project Named for Water Villa de Arma sits at about 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) in central-southern Peru. According to the Peruvian nonprofit Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN), the village lies in a key watershed that feeds the Chincha Valley, a ribbon of green that runs from the high Andes to the dry Pacific coast and depends almost entirely on what descends from the mountains. In 2025, ECOAN teamed up with the international nonprofit Global Forest Generation to launch Yaku Pacha, Quechua for "land of water." The project restores two ecosystems at once: a natural wetland, and forests of polylepis, a genus of high-altitude Andean trees. Global Forest Generation CEO Florent Kaiser frames the idea plainly. These ecosystems should be valued not only as nature but as working infrastructure, the upstream partner of the dams and reservoirs far below. The Trees That Drink From the Clouds Polylepis, known locally as queñua, is a tree in the rose family, and it holds a remarkable record: according to the American Bird Conservancy, polylepis forests grow at higher elevations than any other forests on Earth. Their twisted trunks and papery, peeling bark are built for cold, thin air. Their real talent, though, is catching water. The branches comb moisture out of passing fog and cloud, and a thick carpet of moss at the base releases it slowly into streams. A restored stand can plant as many as 2,400 trees per hectare, so the forest works like a sponge laid across the slope. The trees are also scarce. Conservation groups estimate that only about 500,000 hectares of polylepis remain across the Andes, and in Peru the forests have shrunk to roughly 3% of their original extent. Firewood cutting, burning for pasture, and grazing animals that eat young seedlings did much of the damage. ECOAN itself grew out of that loss. Biologist Constantino "Tino" Aucca founded it in 2000 around Cusco's Vilcanota mountains, and the group has since developed a distinctly Andean approach to reforestation. Each year, communities there hold the Queuña Raymi, or "Polylepis Festival," a celebration in which hundreds of thousands of seedlings are planted over a couple of months. In 2018, ECOAN and Global Forest Generation founded Acción Andina to carry the model to other countries. Yaku Pacha is one of its newest chapters. A Landscape Already Changing For people in Villa de Arma, the stakes are immediate. ECOAN reports that shifting rainfall has produced longer dry seasons, which strain livestock and farming, the main economic activities of the highlands. The community's primary water source is a 16-hectare (39.5-acre) wetland that stores and releases water much as a glacier does. Pastures stay green in the rainy season, but the dry months are hard. As ECOAN regional director Alan Chamorro Cuestas puts it, without water there is little a highland family can do. That natural infrastructure has been wearing thin. Cattle fragment nearby forests and reduce the land's ability to hold water, firewood harvesting adds pressure, and erosion has appeared around the wetland. Wouter Buytaert, a hydrology professor at Imperial College London, names human interference such as overgrazing as the most direct threat. He also notes that rising temperatures could shrink wetlands through faster evaporation. Why a Textile Mill Cares About a Mountain Wetland The consequences run far below the village. The same water reaches the Chincha Valley, one of the largest valleys on Peru's southern coast, and people have been organizing life around it for a very long time. The Chincha Kingdom flourished there from about 900 to 1450 CE. Accounts of the kingdom describe thousands of farmers, fisherfolk, and merchants, and a valley population thought to have reached around 100,000. Its farmers built irrigation systems and fertilized their maize with seabird guano from offshore islands, which helped make the kingdom wealthy enough to catch the Incas' attention in the late fifteenth century. The valley's later history is just as layered. Today Chincha is known as a center of Afro-Peruvian culture, the cajón drum, and a cuisine shaped by African heritage. Each February the town of Chincha Alta holds the Verano Negro ("Black Summer") festival of food, music, and dance. All of it, from the ancient kingdom to the festival, rests on water that begins in places like Villa de Arma. Modern business has started to notice the connection. Textil del Valle, a textile company in the lower valley, is a co-funder of the project. Its head of sustainability, José Benites Colan, sees watershed restoration as a way to balance the large volumes of water used to dye fabric. Restoring the Watershed In its first year, Yaku Pacha has focused on rebuilding the highland landscape from the ground up: • 30,000 polylepis seedlings were planted in 2025 by Villa de Arma residents working with the project team. The trees act like sponges, catching moisture from air masses that would otherwise drift past. • The 16-hectare wetland is being restored with irrigation ditches, reinforced with soil and rocks to halt further degradation. • Local families join in both planting and ongoing care, and the project pays a per-sapling amount into a community fund that covers needs such as infrastructure repairs and solar panels. • Some residents are being trained as nursery and restoration technicians, and workshops teach the value of forests and wetlands, in the hope that new local work will bring young people home. Polylepis forests can take around ten years to show results, while wetland restoration should pay off faster. That timing matters. "Communities need help now, not in five years," Chamorro Cuestas says. An Old Idea: "Sowing" Water in the Mountains Yaku Pacha belongs to a larger Peruvian rediscovery of how ancient highlanders handled water. In Huarochirí Province, about 80 kilometers from Lima, communities are repairing amunas, a network of stone-lined channels built roughly 1,400 years ago, before the Inca. The word comes from Quechua and means "to retain." During the rainy season the canals divert stream water onto rocky hillsides, where it soaks into the mountain. It reappears weeks later at downhill springs, just when the dry season begins. One local villager recalls hearing his parents say they had to "sow" the water at the top. Science has started to back up that old intuition. A 2019 study in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Buytaert, found that water sent through the amunas stays underground for an average of about 45 days before resurfacing. The authors estimated that restoring such systems across the watersheds that supply Lima could raise dry-season river flows by around 7.5% on average. That is not enough to end a drought, but it is meaningful for a desert capital of millions that draws much of its water from a single river, the Rímac. The amunas and Yaku Pacha tell the same story at different scales. In both, the mountain itself is the reservoir, and the people who live on it are the ones who keep it working. Can Nature-Based Solutions Deliver? Scientists remain divided on how far nature-based approaches can go. Buytaert cautions that few water-supply problems can be solved by nature alone, that a wetland's downstream effect is hard to predict, and that results depend heavily on local geology and rainfall. "It's certainly not a panacea," he says. Still, he sees these methods as valuable and flexible, especially alongside conventional dams and reservoirs, and he argues that doing nothing is not an option. The Global Forest Generation team sees Yaku Pacha as a possible blueprint. The project is part of Acción Andina, which now involves more than 50,000 community members across 27 projects in five countries. To make the case for replication, the team is developing monitoring frameworks and installing instruments to measure the project's effect on the watershed, with the aim of convincing governments and companies that the approach works. Kaiser is frank that the full hydrological payoff will take years, even decades. The effect on the community is already visible, however. Neighboring communities have asked to join, and the residents of Villa de Arma keep guarding the wetland themselves. - [Peru](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/tag/peru) - [Andes](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/tag/andes) 0 [Avanti Destinations](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/author/avanti-destinations) [![image](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hubfs/shutterstock_1054856660.jpg)](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/the-soul-of-portugal-fado-in-lisbon-porto) [previous](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/the-soul-of-portugal-fado-in-lisbon-porto) ### [The Soul of Portugal: Fado in Lisbon & Porto](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/the-soul-of-portugal-fado-in-lisbon-porto) [![image](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hubfs/shutterstock_2297802031.jpg)](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/nates-week-in-germany-gluhwein-gothic-spires-and-a-dachshund-museum) [next](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/nates-week-in-germany-gluhwein-gothic-spires-and-a-dachshund-museum) ### [Nate's Week in Germany: Gluhwein, Gothic Spires, and a Dachshund Museum](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/nates-week-in-germany-gluhwein-gothic-spires-and-a-dachshund-museum) [![2025-2026 Go365 e-Brochure](https://content.avantidestinations.com/images/Blog_Ads/Blog_Ad_Book_Early.png)](https://quote.avantidestinations.com/home) [![Repeat Travel Benefit](https://content.avantidestinations.com/images/Blog_Ads/Blog_Ad_Insider_Tours.png)](https://book.avantidestinations.com/goto=db_insider_tours) [![Last-Minute Europe Travel](https://content.avantidestinations.com/images/Blog_Ads/Blog_Ad_Loyalty_Program.png)](https://book.avantidestinations.com/goto=db_loyalty) [![Avanti Destinations Logo](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png?width=100&height=63&name=Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png "Avanti Destinations Logo")](http://www.avantidestinations.com) - [The Avanti Traveler](https://info.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler) - [Blog Homepage](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler) - [Avanti Podcast](https://blog.avantidestinations.com/avanti-podcast/the-avanti-podcast) - [Avanti Destinations](https://www.avantidestinations.com/home) - [Subscribe Now](https://share.hsforms.com/1FoJwsgeZQ366rRMQXb1RJQ158jk) [Follow us on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/travel_avanti/) [Follow us on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/AvantiDestinations/) [Follow us on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@avantidestinations) [Follow us on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/avanti-destinations) ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Avanti Destinations", "url" : "https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/author/avanti-destinations" }, "dateModified" : "2026-11-13T19:38:55.358Z", "datePublished" : "2026-09-01T17:45:00.000Z", "headline" : "Happy News From South America: How One Peruvian Village Is Rebuilding the Andes' Lost Ice", "image" : [ "https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hubfs/shutterstock_2037888599.jpg" ], "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://blog.avantidestinations.com/the-avanti-traveler/happy-news-from-south-america-how-one-peruvian-village-is-rebuilding-the-andes-lost-ice", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://blog.avantidestinations.com/hubfs/Avanti-Logo-Color-4.png" }, "name" : "Avanti Destinations" } } ```