Aymara

The Aymara live in the Andean highlands around Lake Titicaca, and their name is traced to a phrase meaning ‘a place with many communally owned farms’. Their ancestors have lived in the high Andes for thousands of years, and the great city of Tiwanaku, which may have been founded around 110, stood on their lands, though whether the Aymara built it is uncertain.

The Inca held the area sacred: their emperors made pilgrimages to the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca and to the ruins of Tiwanaku. In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century the Aymara came under Inca rule, and in the sixteenth century under the Spanish Empire.