the.com/vicuna
a wild Andean diva whose wool costs more than your car
means A small wild relative of the llama, native to the high Andes, prized for producing one of the finest and most expensive natural fibers on earth.
from From Spanish 'vicuña,' borrowed from Quechua 'wikuña,' the name the Andean peoples gave the animal long before the Spanish arrived. The word traveled down the mountains intact, dragging its tilde into Spanish and then losing it in English, but the creature it names has roamed the altiplano under that sound for centuries.
- price tag
- raw fleece fetches over 400 dollars per kilogram
- royal cloth
- Incas reserved its wool for emperors only
- high altitude
- thrives above 12,000 feet in the Andes
- alpaca ancestor
- wild relative believed to have spawned domestic alpacas
- near miss
- hunting crashed numbers to 6,000 before recovery