Thanks to Conservationists, Prized Cloth of Incas Makes a Comeback

ARICA, Chile —  The cloth of the Inca monarchs is about to make a comeback.

Once reserved for the sacred garments of Inca rulers, the silky cloth made from the hair of the vicuna became a fashion item for Spanish conquistadors and their descendants.

So prized was it that overhunting threatened the vicuna with extinction. In 1973 sales of the cloth were banned under an international treaty governing trade in endangered species.

But thanks to a successful conservation plan, the vicuna is now flourishing again in Chile, and environmentalists are planning to start making the cloth again.

This time the project will ensure the survival of the vicuna, a deer-like animal that is part of the camel family.

“This is the first attempt at utilizing a mammal in a sustainable way in Latin America,” said Hernan Torres, a conservation consultant advising the project.

Animals will not be the only ones to benefit.

Organizers say the plan could bring millions of dollars to the Aymara-speaking descendants of the Incas who scratch out a precarious living on the high Andean plains.

By 1970 only 1,000 vicuna were left in the area near Chile’s 15,000-foot-high Lake Chungara.

“They were on the brink of extinction,” said Juan Pablo Contreras, head of the wildlife department of the state forestry corporation, Conaf, in northern Chile.

To save them and other threatened species, Chile set up the Llauca National Park in the spectacular high-altitude plains overlooked by snow-capped volcanoes on the border with Bolivia.

Conaf began patrolling the park and enlisted the help of the Indians who farm alpaca and llama, animal cousins of the vicuna.

“Immediately the vicuna began to increase,” Contreras said.

By the early 1980s, there were about 15,000 vicuna in the park. But the local Indians complained that the vicuna were competing with domesticated animals for scarce food.

So Conaf, with the help of the Swiss-based World Conservation Union, began looking for ways of using the vicuna to help the local farming community, but without endangering the species.

Early attempts to capture and shear the vicuna caused too many to die of stress. Conaf was forced to look to the past.

“The techniques we’re using now were copied from the Incas,” Contreras said. The vicuna are herded toward the end of ravines or mountain slopes where there are stone corrals with enough space to contain a large number of animals without hurting them.

The harvest is small but valuable.

Each vicuna gives just 7 ounces of hair and can be sheared only once every two years.

But the hair is one of the world’s finest natural fibers, and the cloth, naturally a milky coffee color, is sold on the black market for as much as $1,000 a foot.

In 1984, foreseeing the need for projects like this, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species eased the ban on trading in vicuna products.

A project in Peru, mixing vicuna with coarser alpaca, has already begun but has been hampered by guerrillas and economic turmoil. Chile will be the first to sell pure vicuna products.