A salt miner at work in the Maras Salt Mines, known locally as the Salineras de Maras, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Cusco, Peru. Believed to have been built by a pre-Incan civilization, the salt flats are owned today by local communities to produce the famous pink salt. Water from a natural underground spring is channeled into over 3,000 salt flats, where the sun slowly evaporates the water and the miners use ancestral techniques to extract and purify thhe salt.