The population of Miraflores, which is in Peru’s Nor Yauyos-Cochas Landscape Reserve, has been shrinking as its younger inhabitants leave to start new lives in the nearby capital, Lima. In some ways, this mirrors the town’s founding more than a century ago, when its initial inhabitants moved there from another settlement called Huaquis – now a ghost town.
I have travelled in many Andean communities where people don’t have access to water. Within the next 70 years, we will no longer have glaciers, and their disappearance, combined with a drop in rainfall, has had an impact on agriculture in Miraflores. The people’s ancestors in Huaquis made use of lagoons, dams, dykes and canals dating back to the pre-Hispanic period, which the people of Miraflores are learning to restore and revive. I feel like while maybe we are not winning this big war, we are still winning some important battles, and Miraflores is an example of that. By embracing the ancient technology of their ancestors, the people there still have water.
