49 Fun Facts About Lake Titicaca

Which indigenous people have farmed Lake Titicaca's terraced shores since before the Incas and still live around it today?

The Aymara: they were working the lake's stone terraces before the Incas arrived, and they later absorbed the island-dwelling Uros, who gave up their own language for Aymara.

Titicaca is often described as the world's highest what?

Navigable lake: the title counts only lakes worked by large ships. Plenty of small pools lie far higher, among them one in the summit crater of Ojos del Salado, a volcano on the border of Chile and Argentina.

Lake Titicaca's surface lies about 3,810 metres up, higher than the summit of which famous mountain?

Mount Fuji: Japan's highest peak reaches only 3,776 metres, yet Puno, a city of more than 100,000 people, sits on Titicaca's shore above that height.

Titicaca is often called South America's largest lake, but which bigger Venezuelan rival, open to the sea, is sometimes ranked first?

Lake Maracaibo: at about 13,500 square kilometres it dwarfs Titicaca, but a strait links it to the Gulf of Venezuela and sea water mixes in, so many geographers class it as a bay or lagoon.

How have buses long crossed Lake Titicaca's Strait of Tiquina?

By barge: each bus is floated across on a flat pontoon while its passengers follow in a separate boat. A bridge has been proposed for decades, but the boatmen whose living it would end oppose it.

In Inca myth, which creator god made the sun, moon and stars from islands in Lake Titicaca?

Viracocha: in the Inca telling he first washed away a failed race of giants in a flood, then brought light to the dark world from the lake, which made Titicaca one of the most sacred places they knew.

The Río Desaguadero runs south from Lake Titicaca; what does desaguadero mean in Spanish?

Drain: a fitting name for the one river that empties the lake, though it is a feeble drain, carrying off only a small share of the water Titicaca loses each year.

How do visitors get around Isla del Sol, the largest island in Lake Titicaca?

On foot: the rocky, hilly island has no paved roads and no motor vehicles, so its farming families and their visitors all walk.

Lake Titicaca's great mass of water makes the climate along its shores what, compared with the surrounding plateau?

Milder: the water soaks up the sun's heat by day and gives it back at night, softening the plateau's harsh climate, which is why farms and villages crowd the lake's shores.

The "titi" in the name Titicaca is usually translated as which animal?

Puma: the usual reading of the name is "rock of the puma", after a sacred crag on Isla del Sol, but scholars call its meaning uncertain, and "crag of lead" is a rival translation.

In 2012 the Global Nature Fund gave Titicaca which unwelcome title?

Threatened Lake of the Year: the fund names one lake each year, and it picked Titicaca mainly because sewage from fast-growing lakeside cities such as Puno pours in largely untreated.

Which traditional leaf tea do hotels around Lake Titicaca offer new arrivals against altitude sickness?

Coca tea: at about 3,800 metres the thin air leaves many newcomers breathless and headachy, and a cup of mate de coca is the Andes' time-honoured welcome, though its benefit has never been properly tested.

The Uros people build their floating islands from layers of which plant?

Totora sedge: fresh layers go on top as the bottom ones rot, and the same plant gives the Uros their boats, their houses and even a snack, since its tender base is eaten.

According to legend, why did the Uros originally build islands that floated?

To move away from hostile neighbours: the Uros are said to have built their islands as the Incas pushed into their lands, and a watchtower rises on many of them.

What stops the Uros' floating islands from drifting away across Lake Titicaca?

Ropes tied to the lakebed: long cables tether the floating root blocks to each other and to stakes driven into the bottom, which holds the whole raft in place through wind and waves.

According to Uru legend, the Uros claimed to have blood of what colour, because they never felt the cold?

They called themselves Lupihaques, 'sons of the Sun', and considered themselves the owners of the lake and its water.

Isla del Sol, the largest sacred island, is reached by boat from which Bolivian lakeside town?

Copacabana: its shrine to the Virgin of Copacabana, Bolivia's patron saint, was so revered that a chapel dedicated to her in Rio de Janeiro gave the famous beach district there its name.

What was the name of the Inca sun god, said to have been born on Lake Titicaca's Isla del Sol?

Inti: the Inca emperors claimed him as their ancestor and travelled to his temple on the island in pilgrimage once a year.

In one Inca origin legend, Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo rose from Lake Titicaca before going on to found which city?

Cusco: in this telling the Sun sent the pair to earth at the lake, and they travelled north to found the Inca capital. A rival version has the founders step out of a cave near Cusco instead.

Which novelist's The Confidence-Man opens with a stranger appearing "suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca"?

Herman Melville: the first Inca was said to have appeared at the lake as a child of the Sun, so the simile lends a touch of the miraculous to a mysterious stranger boarding a Mississippi steamboat at dawn.

On the Peruvian island of Taquile, which craft is performed exclusively by males from the age of eight?

Knitting: boys start at about eight, and the men turn out the island's fine earflapped chullo caps, while the women spin the wool and weave wide belts that record the farming year like a calendar.

In the 20th century, Bolivia used the remote Isla de la Luna in Lake Titicaca to hold whom?

Political prisoners: the island jail held opponents of Bolivia's rulers behind high adobe walls and a moat of icy lake water, yet in 1972 dozens of inmates staged a famous escape.

Amantani island's twin peaks are named Pachatata and Pachamama; what does Pachamama mean?

Mother Earth: she is the earth-mother goddess of the Andes, whose worship outlasted both the Inca cult of the sun and the Spanish conquest and is still strong in the highlands today.

Boatbuilders from Lake Titicaca's Suriqui island built the ocean-going Ra II and Tigris for which Norwegian explorer?

Thor Heyerdahl: his first papyrus boat broke up short of the Caribbean in 1969, so for Ra II he hired builders from the lake, and their craft carried him from Morocco to Barbados the next year.

Which pre-Inca civilisation, whose ruined capital stands near Lake Titicaca's southern shore, dominated the lake for centuries before the Incas?

Tiwanaku: its state grew up in the lake basin between about the 5th and 12th centuries, and the Incas who followed revered its ruins and raised their own island shrines on the same sacred ground.

Offerings raised by divers from Khoa reef, off Lake Titicaca's Isla del Sol, include incense burners shaped like which animal?

Felines: the burners were sunk together with sacrificed young llamas and ornaments of gold, shell and stone, in state rituals held on the lake centuries before the Incas arrived.

Which Bolivian salt lake, fed by Lake Titicaca's outflow, dried up completely in 2015?

Lake Poopó: once Bolivia's second-largest lake and the fishing ground of the communities around it, it vanished after years of drought and the diversion of its water for mining and farming.

The Titicaca orestias, a native fish last seen in the 1930s, was probably wiped out by which fish introduced to the lake?

Trout: several kinds were released into the lake from the late 1930s and, along with a silverside brought from Argentina, they ate or outcompeted the big native killifish within a few decades.

What unflattering nickname has Lake Titicaca's loose-skinned amphibian Telmatobius culeus earned?

Titicaca scrotum frog: the baggy folds stand in for its undersized lungs, giving a huge surface for soaking up oxygen from the cold water, so it can live its whole life beneath the surface.

Which explorer's late-1960s expedition filmed Lake Titicaca's giant frogs and reported some weighing a kilogram?

Jacques Cousteau: he had come to hunt for sunken Inca treasure with mini-submarines and found frogs instead, filming them on the bottom some 120 metres down, deeper than any frog had been seen before.

The Titicaca grebe, a bird largely confined to the lake, is notable for being unable to do what?

Fly: its stubby wings only help it scuttle across the water, and since fine nylon fishing nets spread over the lake in the 1990s so many birds have drowned in them that the species is now endangered.

Both the Peruvian and Bolivian sides of Lake Titicaca are listed as wetlands of international importance under which convention?

Ramsar: the treaty takes its name from the Iranian city where it was signed in 1971, and the lake's bird-rich shallows earned a listing first for one country's shore and then for the other's in the late 1990s.

In Disney's 1942 film Saludos Amigos, which character tours Lake Titicaca and tangles with a stubborn llama?

Donald Duck: playing an American tourist, he meets the lake's people and then tries to ride an obstinate llama across a swaying bridge, with predictable results. Goofy turns up later in the film as a gaucho.

The steamship Yavari, launched on the lake in 1870, originally burned what fuel?

Dried llama dung: the boilers burned what the local herds supplied. Left to rust in the 20th century, the Victorian ship was rescued in 1987 and now serves as a museum and guest house moored at Puno.

How were the parts of the Yavari carried the last 220 miles from the railhead at Tacna to Puno?

By pack mule: no part of the kit could weigh more than a mule could carry, and the trek stalled so badly that a ship built in London in 1862 was not launched on the lake until 1870.

Landlocked Bolivia keeps a navy on Lake Titicaca, having lost its Pacific coast in a 19th-century war to which country?

Chile: Bolivia's coast went in the War of the Pacific, and in 1883 Chile even hauled a torpedo boat up by rail to patrol the lake. Bolivian sailors parade each year on the Day of the Sea.

The Victorian gunboat Yapura, launched on Lake Titicaca in 1873, still serves Peru's navy as what?

A hospital ship: renamed BAP Puno, she carries medical care to the small communities around the shore, a second career for a hull that was built on the Thames in 1862.

Which 1990s cartoon series gave Lake Titicaca its own song?

Animaniacs: the three Warner siblings sing a whole number about the lake, for no better reason than that they really like saying its name.

Each February the lakeside city of Puno fills with thousands of what for its UNESCO-listed Candelaria festival?

Costumed dancers: troupes from across the region compete in two great contests in honour of the Virgin of Candelaria, the showpiece of a city that styles itself Peru's folklore capital.

Lake Titicaca sits at the northern end of which high, closed drainage basin?

The Altiplano: no river on this high plateau reaches the sea, so whatever overflows from Titicaca runs south into salt lakes and salt flats, the greatest of them the Salar de Uyuni.

A 136-metre sediment core drilled from Lake Titicaca's bed shows the lake stood deepest and freshest during which periods?

Ice ages: the core spans about 370,000 years and four glacial cycles, and each time the Andean glaciers advanced the lake rose and freshened, then shrank to a salty closed basin in the warm spells between.

Which world staple was first domesticated in the highlands around Lake Titicaca, some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago?

Potato: farmers near the lake bred it from a wild nightshade, and their descendants still grow it on stepped terraces beside the water, along with quinoa and barley.

Which snow-capped range, with peaks above 6,000 metres, rises along the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca?

Cordillera Real: the glaciers of this Royal Range send meltwater down towards the lake, and scientists warn that they are shrinking fast enough to disappear within decades.

Which Bolivian city lies about an hour's drive from Lake Titicaca?

La Paz: a narrow-gauge railway was built from the city to the lake port of Guaqui, where boats cross to Peru, so the lake long doubled as Bolivia's back door to the outside world.

Lake Titicaca's one river outlet removes only a small share of its lost water; what takes the rest?

Evaporation: fierce high-altitude sun and strong, dry winds lift away far more water than the outlet carries, so the lake's level rises and falls with each run of wet or dry years.

The Inca ruins on Lake Titicaca's Isla de la Luna are thought to have housed whom?

Chosen women: these were girls picked to live in temple convents under a vow of chastity, preparing ritual food and weaving the garments worn by the emperor.

Lake Titicaca's endangered giant frogs are poached to be blended into what?

A supposed health tonic: market stalls whizz a frog with water and honey into "frog juice", sold as a cure-all and aphrodisiac, though nothing supports the claims.

The crescent-shaped boats of Lake Titicaca are often likened to craft pictured on the monuments of which ancient civilisation?

Ancient Egypt: the likeness is close enough that when an explorer set out to cross the Atlantic in a copy of a pharaoh's papyrus ship, he sent for boatbuilders from the lake to make it.

What modern equipment, handed out by a Peruvian president in the 1990s, now powers televisions on the Uros' floating islands?

Solar panels: Alberto Fujimori gave each island two on a visit, and today nearly every island shares panels that run televisions and even an Uros radio station.