The Argentine Puna (Spanish Edition)

Puna is a Quechua word that jeans high land. The Puna is an elevated plateau, more than three thousand meters above the sea-level, over which rose the four to six thousand meter peaks of the Andes range. An extension of the vast Bolivian Altiplano, the Argentine Puna includes mainly the west of Jujuy, Salta and Catamarca provinces. Bonifacio del Carril has explored and photographed this desolate and imposing natural landscape: salt flats, ice-capped mountains, cones of lava, lunar deserts, milky lagoons inhabited by flamingos and endless arid fields grazed by elegant vicunas. Despite the cold and pervasive winds, thin air and strong solar radiation, the Puna has been inhabited by man for millennia and holds aboriginal ruins, colonial churches and ghostly mining towns. It is a kind of Argentine Tibet. The images are best savored together with a short narrative and the voices of ancient chronicles, local people, storytellers and poets that have sung the beauty of this splendid hidden corner of Argentina.