Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

2. The “Natural” Landscape of Moquegua

19 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322764:c02 2 The “Natural” Landscape of Moquegua The crux of the problem was temperature. Spain lies in the temperate zone.The great bulk of the Spanish empire lay [in the tropics]. No farmer would ever be able to grow the staples of an Iberian diet at sea level in the tropical latitudes. He would have to . . . find a substitute for a higher latitude in a higher altitude. —Alfred Crosby (1972: 70) The Department of Moquegua is a small and historically relatively impoverished political unit in the western Andean watershed, in the far south of the present nation-state of Peru. It is bordered by the Departments of Arequipa to the west, Puno to the northeast, and Tacna to the southeast and by the Pacific Ocean on the southwest (see figure 1.1). Moquegua’s most distinctive environmental characteristics are its arid climate, sharp altitudinal zonation, and frequent tectonic activity (Rice 1989). Except for the modern cities of Moquegua and Samegua, the landscape is decidedly rural, its built structures and their distribution a function of the valley ’s agricultural economy and historical patterns of land division. Examination of the components of the natural (as opposed to cultural) landscape generally begins with the physical environment. Physical environments, in turn, are typically described and analyzed in terms of their physiographic and biological components,including geology and soils, climate and weather, topography, hydrography, and floral and faunal populations. The natural landscape of Moquegua is dominated by mountains and desert. Physiographically, the department lies on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains,its eastern edge demarcated by the towering THE “NATURAL” LANDSCAPE OF MOQUEGUA 20 cordillera separating that watershed from the basin of Lake Titicaca in the altiplano (“high plateau”; elevations ca. 3,500–4,000 m). Peaks reach above 6,000 m (19,500 ft) in elevation, with several small lakes tucked among them.Thermal springs and baths, with water temperatures of 72°C (162°F), are found in the higher elevations of the department (Anonymous 1998: 812). Numerous volcanoes, dormant and active, lie in the cordillera. Three in the Department of Moquegua—Ubinas, Huaynaputina, and Ticsane—have erupted frequently. Southern Peru is active tectonically, with major destructive earthquakes—sometimes accompanied by deadly tsunamis—in 1600, 1604, 1715, 1784, 1831, 1868, 2001, and 2006 (Rice 2009). Moquegua and its wine industry also suffered economic repercussions from earthquakes occurring farther to the north, including in Cusco in 1650, south-central Peru in 1687, and Lima in 1746. The narrow Pacific coastal region of Moquegua crosses the arid to hyper-arid Atacama Desert, which runs from northern coastal Peru through Chile. Lying at elevations below 1,000 m (3,280 ft), the coastal strip is only 3–7 km (2–4 mi) wide on the north side of the Río Osmore.South of the river it widens,reaching 30–50 km (18–30 mi) inland beyond the department’s borders.This barren, hilly coastal desert is frequently fog-shrouded and lacks both rainfall and permanent vegetation except for temporary growth responding to garúa, a thick, drizzlelike coastal advection fog formed as air cooled by the ocean moves over land and upslope, cooling further and condensing. The early Spaniards learning the environment of southwestern Peru faced different challenges in establishing their agro-pastoral regimes compared with earlier indigenous Andean colonists. As noted in the epigraph, the Iberian Peninsula enjoyed a temperate climate, but Spain’s empire primarily comprised tropical regions of the Americas, where many Iberian dietary staples could not be grown at sea level. Making the Andean environment productive for both plants and animals meant adapting to the mountains and exchanging latitude for altitude. geology: mountainS and mineralS The geology of Moquegua (Barua 1961; Bellido Bravo 1979: 36–41; ONERN 1976: 89–106; Shockey et al.2009),like that of the entire western Andean region, is complex, with sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous/volcanic deposits dating generally from Precambrian through Quaternary times. Sedimentary and metamorphic rocks in the Osmore drainage basin include clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestone, and quartzites. Igneous rocks comprise volcanics such as tuffs and deposits formed from lavas of andesitic, rhyolitic, and dacitic THE “NATURAL” LANDSCAPE OF MOQUEGUA 21 composition; intrusives are components of the Andean Batholith, including diorite, granodiorite, granite, monzonite, and dacite. The Department of Moquegua is dominated geologically by the Moquegua Formation, a Tertiary-age deposit of continental sediments extending many hundreds of...