First you need to build a ‘House’. It doesn’t need to be a palace!

If you travel around Peru, especially by bus, you will see many little huts in the deserts. It is easy to see that no-one really lives in them, so what are they for? Well the answer is simple – you are looking at a land invasion.

In Peru much of the land between the big cities is empty and belongs to the state.  When you look at it you wouldn’t think that anyone would want to live there because most of it is just desert.

In Peru, the laws allow someone to start living on empty land, to try and farm it for example. When they have been on that land for 10 years they can demand the government begins to supply them with services, like electricity and water.

But Peruvians can build a wall around some land and build a small house just to claim the land, knowing that if they wait they can eventually get water and electricity and start to build a new village and irrigate the land. Once this process starts the land starts to become valuable.

Land invasions - how to get your own piece of Peru!

Some of these land invasions are very well organised, with the houses laid out in a grid patter, with streets and some even have signs telling you the name of the new town!

So now you know when you see them, that these little boxes in the dessert will one day be farms and villages.

The Colca Canyon in Peru is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Colca Canyon is a canyon of the Colca River in southern Peru. It is located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Arequipa. It is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States. However, the canyon’s walls are not as steep as the Grand Canyon. There is an even deeper canoyon, the Cotahuasi Canyon to the north west at 11,488 ft (3,501 m). Both the Colca and Cotahuasi canyons are both easily seen in satellite photos of this region. The Colca Valley is a colorful Andean valley with towns founded in Spanish Colonial times and formerly inhabited by the Collaguas and the Cabanas. The local people still maintain ancestral traditions and continue to cultivate the pre-Inca stepped terraces.

The pre-Inca terraces are still farmed today.

The canyon is home to the Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus), a species that has seen world-wide effort to preserve it. The condors can be seen at fairly close range as they fly through the canyon walls and are an increasingly popular attraction. ‘Cruz del Condor’ is a popular tourist stop to view the condors, the pass where condors soar gracefully on the rising thermals occurring as the air warms. The condors are best seen in the early morning and late afternoon when they are hunting. At this point the canyon floor is 3,960 ft (1,200 m) below the rim of the canyon.

The La Calera natural hot springs are located at Chivay, the biggest town in the Colca Canyon, they are very popular with tourists.

The ancient farmers of Colca made use of every piece of land they could farm

Papea Peru - Potatoes for Patriots!

In Peru the Ministery of Agriculture has launched a campaign to encourage people to eat more potatoes. This is both a nutritious choice and a patriotic act! With the massive increase in the cost of imported wheat and other cereals in the last year people in Peru found that the price of bread went up about 40%. In poorer parts of Peru this is a real problem because there is the risk of children not getting enough nutrition if the food is too expensive. The Peruvian response was creative as usual and the shops were soon selling ‘Papapan’, literally Potato Bread.

When I was last in Peru I tried some of this bread and it was nice, it is quite soft and tastes good, it is not pure potato but is a mix of wheat flour and about 30% mashed potato and tastes like French bread but has more iron. It would be nice to buy here in the UK.

Scientists believe that potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes about 8,000 years ago and there are now over 4,000 varieties (a few more than you will find in a british supermarket!) which allow potatoes of one kind or another to be grown in the very varied environments, high up in the mountains, in the valleys in dry or wet environments.

As well as proving a valuable source of nutrition for Peruvians and other Andean this incredible variety of potatoes could help feed people all around the world in very different climates where other crops would have problems.

The ‘Papea Peru’ campaign not only encourages people to eat potatoes but reminds them that it is good for their pockets and their country, as more demand for potatoes means more money for communities that produce them. ‘Papea’ is a slang word meaning ‘eat’ like English people say ‘scoff’ that actually comes from the word Papa, meaning potato. So it has a double meaning, both ‘Eat Peruvian’ and ‘Peruvian Potatoes’ – it doesn’t translate so easily. In the television commercials people from different walks of life say ‘Este Pechito Come Papa’, this is also slang, literally translating as ‘This chest eats potato’ which is what you would say while patting your chest to show you mean yourself, like if you were saying ‘I was the one who thought of that!’ so it means they are proudly saying  ’I eat potato’!

In this video you will see people who eat potato – including in our modern society a ‘Gringo’ immigrant with his wife and baby!

You can see they have Pastel de Papa (a savoury potato cake), mashed potato, and a Peruvian favourite called Papa Rellena (a ball of potato stuffed with meat).

There is a lot of word play going on here, but the translation is something like. “Potatoes are nutritious and eating well  is good. Put potatoes on your Plate – Papea Peru!”

Tuna, a type of cactus, growing in fields in Arequipa Province, Peru

For centuries Cochineal has been prized for its colour for dying fabric and now is commonly used in food products as a ‘natural’ food colouring. You can find it in ingredients lists, called carmine, or E120. Here are some photos from the production…

The white patches are colonies of cochineal insects

The insects are scraped off the cactus and boiled to kill them. Then they are dried….

Cochineal traders line the roads, who buy and sell 'fresh and dry' cochineal

There is a nice by-product of this industry – the Tuna fruit. These ra the fruit of the cactus and are sold in the shops but only after the spikes have been removed. It has soft, juicy red flesh and is popular as a juice. It has a delicious flavour, which you might think of as like watermelon but stronger. So if someone offers you some ‘Tuna Juice’ don’t worry its not fish, its a lovely drink

Irrigations outside Arequipa are popular places to find tuna fields, there are  a lot of cochineal traders and I imagine that the prize that they is not bad.