Alpaca Yarns
The story of Alpacas
Hidden in the mists of the high Andes, a mystical and almost magical little animal has journeyed over five millennia, domesticated and in partnership with their human owners.
1000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed, the ancient ancestors of the Inca were measuring their wealth by the numbers of alpacas they owned, enjoying the finest garments woven from the fleece of their great alpaca herds. Members of the pre-Incan nobility were draping themselves in multicoloured robes of gossamer sheen produced from the alpaca fibre, as they performed the mysterious rituals of their religion and culture.
500 years before Rome began to build its empire, the Pre-Incan, Peruvian people were expanding a thriving economy built in part on the commercial value of the treasured alpacas, through man's first known use of selective breeding, they were producing
alpacas whose quality of fleece was truly magnificient. So it remained for another 2,000 years until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 17th century AD.
The Alpaca treasured for 4000 years, was viewed as a competitor for grazing lands of the Spaniard's sheep, and therefore more useful as a source of meat. This deliberate decimation of the great alpaca herds would have led to the eventual extinction of these
delightful animals, however as the surviving Inca's fled to the sanctuary of the highest reaches of the Andes with their prized alpacas, in exile a much more hardy and healthy alpaca developed in the stern and demanding highlands .Amost indestructible, fine woven
Alpaca garments in remarkably good condition have recently been discovered in Peruvian ruins dating back 2,500 years. Indigenous to the Peruvian highlands they are one of the most beautiful of the South American Camelids, related to the Llama, Guanacos and Vicuna. There is an estimated 3.5 to 4.5 million Alpacas exisiting worldwide, 98% of them still located in Peru. Bred in altitudes ranging from 3,500 to 4,500 meters above sea level, where they withstand temperatures that fluctuate between minus 20 degrees to plus 30 degrees in a single day. They survive on a low protein diet based on natural grasses.
Alpaca Yarns' fabulous alpaca knitting wool stock is sourced from a supplier who has set up breeding ranches in the Andean highlands. Their main emphasis is on improving alpacas through sustainable breeding practices, educating small farmers who own most of the animals throughout the region. There is a growing demand for the Alpaca fibre in textile and fashion centres throughout the world. With a drastically limited supply of these animals outside South America and stringent export restrictions on further transport of their national treasures in order to avoid depletion of their own herds, consumers will continue to want more fleece than farmers can produce.
