Given its rugged geography -sleep hills with the characteristic vegetation of the Andean plateau round Puno and with a lake that appears to be immobile in the center of which is a flat circular island, Sillustani is an ideal place for the soul to transcend the mortal flesh. In this quiet and moving landscape the imagination takes wing to become myth, religion or metaphysics. Or it may withdraw into the reigning silence of an area in which you may reach out to the unknown.

There are few place better designed by nature to calm the troubled human mind. Sillustani appears to visitors as the perfect place to say that last goodbye.

That is how we see it now and that is how the ancient inhabitants of the Titicaca region saw it: from time immemorial, Sillustani has been the principal cemetery of the Andean Plateau. What mythology and what rituals have been invented and practiced around the mysterious Lake Umayo? The silence lets you breathe in the melancholy affair and, as the poet says, melancholy derives from eternity.

Sillustani provokes you to build bridges, visible or invisible, to the great beyond. Experts in comparative history claim that if the Quechua Incas can be considered our Romans, the people of the lake were our Greeks just as Chavin is our ancient Egypt and the land of the Mochica lords our Valley of the Kings. Debatable, no doubt, although the quiet waters of Umayo do make you think of the Lethe, where shades forgot all their memories. Umayo is our Lethe and it is easy to imagine an Aymara Charon in his reed boat carrying the souls of the dead to the Underworld.

At Sillustani the dominant figures are those of the chullpas funerary towers for the most illustrious of the local people. Styles vary depending on the era in which they were built and the importance of their deceased occupants. The most recent and notable chullpas were built in the Inca period, in the so called imperial style: towers of smooth stone bearing serpents and phallic symbols. Eros and Thanatos in their last resting place, ravaged by the passage of time, the fury of storms and lighting and the avarice of grave robbers.

The ruins of one of these spectacular towers give the impression of a modern sculpture. In others, the imposing nature of the tower contrasts with the finality of the death of their inhabitants. Facing the mausoleums is the quiet water and the desolation of the mysterious isle. A variation on a poem by Juarroz: in the center of the isle there is nothing and in center of nothing is a celebration. Sillustani leads you to astonishment and meditation. Here is the grave, and something of ours would like embark with Charon, and be able to return.