Animal · Peru, Bolivia, Chile
Vicuña
Vicugna vicugna — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The vicuña lives higher up than almost any other hoofed animal, on cold Andean plains more than 3 500 metres above the sea. Its fleece is the finest wool in the world: a single hair is only about twelve thousandths of a millimetre thick.
Picture credit: CARLOS TEIXIDOR CADENAS (CC BY 4.0) · Clemens Stockner (CC BY-SA 3.0) · kallerna (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the vicuña live?
Home: high, dry grassland of the Andes.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 80 cm at the shoulder. It weighs about 50 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
A vicuña is a wild cousin of the llama and the alpaca, and it has never been tamed. Families are small: one male, a few females and their young, feeding together on a patch of tough mountain grass that the male guards all year. Because that grass wears teeth down quickly, the vicuña's lower front teeth keep growing throughout its life, with hard enamel on one side only, rather like a rat's. Andean people have prized its wool for over a thousand years. Inca herders drove vicuñas into funnel-shaped traps, sheared them and let them go again, a round-up still held today under the name chaccu. Later, hunting for the fleece nearly wiped the species out, and by the 1960s only a few thousand animals were left. Protection worked: there are several hundred thousand today. The vicuña now stands on the coat of arms of Peru.
Find it on the globe
Vicuña is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why is vicuña wool so expensive?
One animal gives only a few hundred grams of fleece, and it may be shorn only once every two years. The wool is finer than any other, so a single coat can cost as much as a small car.
Is a vicuña the same as an alpaca?
No, but they are close relatives. The alpaca is a farm animal that people bred from the vicuña over thousands of years, while the vicuña itself still lives wild in the mountains.
How can it breathe in such thin air?
Its blood carries many more red cells than ours, and those cells hold on to oxygen especially tightly. That lets a vicuña run uphill at a height where a visitor would be out of breath after a few steps.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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