Andean Capitals & Gateways

In the Andes, altitude does the work that latitude does elsewhere. A change of a thousand metres alters the crops, the air, the architecture and what the body can do, and because the range runs north to south for seven thousand kilometres, a traveller moves between climates by going up and down rather than along.

Andean societies organised themselves around this deliberately. Anthropologists call it the vertical archipelago: a community held land at several elevations at once — coca and maize in the warm valleys, potatoes higher up, llamas on the puna above four thousand metres — and moved produce between its own floors instead of trading for it. The Inca ran an empire of ten million people on that principle, with a road system designed to cross ecological bands rather than to shorten distances.

The Spanish inherited the vertical logic and used it for a different purpose. They put their administrative capitals in the temperate valleys where Europeans could breathe — Quito at 2,850 metres, Bogotá at 2,640 — and their mines wherever the ore was, regardless of what it cost the workers: Potosí sits at 4,090 metres and was one of the largest cities on earth while it produced silver.

That divide still describes the region. The plateau cities are indigenous in language and majority, cold and thin-aired; the valley capitals are colonial in plan and comfortable; and the foothill cities on the Chilean and Argentine side are Mediterranean in climate and largely European in population. Read this collection by elevation and it explains itself.