Vicuña
Vicugna vicugna
— Where the name comes from
Vicuña is the Quechua wik’uña, which passed into Spanish and from there into every European language. In Italian the word also names the cloth, like cashmere or angora: a case in which an animal’s name has become a synonym for a quality. Its wool is the finest natural fibre in the world, twelve microns against the fifteen of the best cashmere.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Even-toed ungulates
- Habitat
- Puna and Andean plateaus between 3,200 and 4,800 metres
- Range
- The central Andes: Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador
- Size
- 145–160 cm long, 35–65 kg
- Diet
- Herbivore — short, tough high-altitude grasses
- Lifespan
- 15–20 years
— Characteristics
- 01
Its lower incisors grow continuously, as in rodents: unique among even-toed ungulates.
- 02
The fleece is so fine that one animal yields barely two hundred grams a year.
- 03
It must drink every day and so never strays far from a spring.
— What sets it apart
Under the Inca its wool was reserved for the emperor, and killing one was punishable by death. Every few years the chaccu was held: thousands of people formed a human chain kilometres long, drove the vicuñas into a corral, sheared them and let them go. After the Spanish conquest that system was abandoned and shooting took its place, cutting the species to six thousand head by the 1960s. The recovery — over three hundred thousand today — came from reinstating the chaccu, that is by going back to a method five hundred years old.
