🇧🇴 Bolivia · Altiplano and the Andean west
In the middle of Lake Titicaca's intense blue, in the shadow of its big sister Isla del Sol, hides a small islet loaded with myth: Isla de la Luna, which the Aymara call Koati. It's a silent, little-visited place where only a handful of families live among crop terraces, and where the one great monument is an Inca temple that has looked out over the lake for more than five hundred years. Getting here means heading into the sacred heart of the Andean altiplano.
According to Inca tradition, if Isla del Sol was the cradle of the god Inti and of the first Inca, Isla de la Luna was consecrated to the goddess Mama Quilla, the Moon. Here stands Iñak Uyu, known as the 'temple of the virgins of the sun' (the acllas), a set of rooms around a courtyard that is one of the best-preserved examples of Inca architecture on the lake. Climbing its stairways, seeing the lake open up on the horizon and feeling the silence of the altiplano is an experience that stays with you.
This guide gathers the essentials for visiting Isla de la Luna with a practical eye: how to get there from Copacabana, how to combine it with Isla del Sol, what to see, what to bring for the altitude and the cold, and how to get around in a place with almost no services. It's a destination for travelers looking for history, nature and quiet far from the crowds.
Isla de la Luna, or Koati in Aymara, has a history deeply tied to the Andean worldview and to Lake Titicaca, considered one of the most sacred places of the pre-Hispanic world. Before the Incas, the lake region was the heart of the Tiwanaku culture, which left its mark on the islands. But it was with the Inca empire, in its southward expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries, that these islands took on their best-known sacred character. According to the origin myth, the Sun god (Inti) and the Moon (Mama Quilla) rose from the waters of Titicaca, and from Isla del Sol were born Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, founders of the Inca lineage. If Isla del Sol was associated with the Sun, Isla de la Luna was associated with Mama Quilla. On it the Incas raised Iñak Uyu, a temple that tradition describes as the dwelling of the acllas or 'virgins of the sun': chosen women who lived devoted to worship, fine weaving and the preparation of offerings and ceremonial chicha. The complex, with its trapezoidal niches typical of Inca architecture, is remarkably well preserved. After the Spanish conquest the islands lost their official religious function, but the Aymara population kept the sacred respect for the lake alive. During the 20th century, Isla de la Luna was used as a place of confinement for political prisoners at some point in Bolivia's turbulent history. Today it's a protected archaeological site and a low-profile tourist destination, where Inca heritage and Aymara campesino life coexist. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The altiplano department and the seat of government: cradle of Tiwanaku and of Murillo's revolution, Aymara land beside Lake Titicaca, dominated by the Cordillera Real and its snowcapped Illimani, with the highest seat of government in the world and an Amazonian flank that drops all the way down to the Madidi.
Read the history of La Paz →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There's an island in the highest navigable lake in the world that the Incas reserved for the Moon. Not for a curaca, not for a general: for Mama Quilla herself, goddess and wife of the Sun, and for the chosen women who lived there devoted entirely to her cult. That island, tiny compared with its neighbor Isla del Sol, is Isla de la Luna, known in Aymara as Koati (also written Coati), a small islet in the Bolivian sector of Lake Titicaca, in Manco Kapac province of the department of La Paz. To understand its importance you have to start from one fundamental fact: Lake Titicaca was, for millennia, one of the most sacred spaces in the Andean world. Its waters, at almost 3,800 meters of altitude, were considered a place of origin, a point where the world of the gods and that of men touched.
Long before the Incas arrived, the Titicaca basin was the heart of the Tiwanaku civilization, which between roughly the 5th and 11th centuries developed a state of great influence on the altiplano. Archaeological research has documented that both Isla del Sol and Isla de la Luna were occupied and ritually used already in pre-Inca times, which shows that the sacred character of these islands long predates the Incas and has its roots in older cultures of the lake.
When the Inca empire expanded south, toward the Collasuyu (the altiplano region), in the 15th and 16th centuries, it inherited and reworked that sacredness. The Incas integrated Titicaca and its islands into their own origin mythology and raised temples and ceremonial buildings on them. Isla de la Luna was thus written into a sacred geography that combined the legacy of Tiwanaku with the new imperial worldview of Cusco.
According to one of the most widespread versions of the Inca origin myth, recorded by the colonial chroniclers, the Sun god (Inti) brought forth from the waters of Lake Titicaca the first founding couple, Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, charging them with civilizing the peoples and founding Cusco. In that narrative, Isla del Sol —Titikala, the 'sacred rock'— was consecrated as the place where the Sun appeared and the cradle of the Inca lineage, while Isla de la Luna was linked to the cult of Mama Quilla, the Moon, wife and sister of the Sun in the Andean pantheon.
This duality is no accident. In the Andean worldview, the great principles are usually organized in complementary pairs: masculine and feminine, day and night, sun and moon. The Inti–Mama Quilla pair represented that cosmic harmony, and having two neighboring islands, one dedicated to the Sun and the other to the Moon, fit perfectly with that logic of balance. Isla de la Luna thus symbolically completed Isla del Sol, together forming the sacred core of the lake.
The Incas, who tended to appropriate the sacred places of the peoples they conquered in order to legitimize their power, found in Titicaca a mythic setting of the first order. By placing the origin of their own lineage there, they connected their authority with the primordial forces of the Andean cosmos. That's why they turned these islands into a great sanctuary, with temples, priests, pilgrimages and offerings, integrating them into the empire's network of huacas (sacred places).
The great monument of Isla de la Luna is Iñak Uyu, an architectural complex from Inca times that tradition identifies as the 'temple of the virgins of the sun'. The name is usually translated from Aymara or Quechua as 'courtyard' or 'enclosure of the women', and it alludes to its ceremonial function tied to the acllas, the chosen women of the Inca empire.
The acllas (or aqllakuna) were young women selected for their beauty, skill or lineage, who lived secluded in compounds called acllahuasi ('house of the chosen women') devoted to religious service and to the state. They learned to weave the finest cloth (cumbi), prepared the ceremonial chicha for rituals, attended to the solar cult, and some were assigned as wives or as offerings. Tradition holds that Isla de la Luna housed an acllahuasi, which explains the name 'temple of the virgins of the sun' by which Iñak Uyu is known.
Architecturally, the complex is laid out around a broad rectangular courtyard surrounded by adobe buildings on stone foundations, with numerous trapezoidal niches and openings, the unmistakable hallmark of Inca architecture. The buildings adapt to the island's steep terrain by means of terraces. Iñak Uyu is one of the best-preserved Inca complexes in the Titicaca region and a precious testimony of how the empire organized sacred space on its southern edges.
The arrival of the Spanish in Peru in the 1530s and the subsequent fall of the Inca empire radically transformed the world of Titicaca. With the conquest, the great Inca sanctuaries lost their official function and many were dismantled or abandoned as part of evangelization and the campaign against what the colonizers called 'idolatries'. The lake's temples, Iñak Uyu on Isla de la Luna included, stopped fulfilling their ceremonial role within a state religion that no longer existed.
The lake region was incorporated into the Viceroyalty of Peru and later, in the 18th century, into the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, within the Audiencia of Charcas (Upper Peru, the future Bolivia). The Aymara population living on the shores and the islands was subjected to the colonial system —encomiendas, tribute, evangelization— but kept many of its traditions, its language and a deep sacred respect for the lake and its waters, which survived beneath the imposed Catholicism.
So although the official Inca cult of Mama Quilla disappeared, the sacred memory of Titicaca was not extinguished. Popular devotion reorganized itself around new forms —such as the sanctuary of the Virgen de Copacabana, on the mainland—, in a typically Andean blend of the pre-Hispanic and the Christian. The islands remained places loaded with history, inhabited by Aymara communities that kept their farming and fishing way of life over the centuries.
For much of its colonial and republican history, Isla de la Luna was a remote, sparsely populated place, home to a few Aymara families. Its isolation, however, gave it an unexpected and dark use in the 20th century: at various moments of Bolivia's turbulent political history, the island is said to have been used as a place of confinement or a prison for detainees and political prisoners, taking advantage of precisely its difficult access and its remoteness. This episode contrasts starkly with the sacred character of the place and is part of its lesser-known history.
As the century went on, the island's archaeological and historical value gained recognition. The Iñak Uyu complex came to be considered cultural heritage and an object of protection and study, within the broader interest in the Inca and pre-Inca heritage of Lake Titicaca, one of the richest archaeological areas in Bolivia alongside Tiwanaku.
Today Isla de la Luna is a low-profile tourist destination, managed largely by the Aymara community that lives there, which charges an entry fee for the upkeep of the site. It's almost always visited together with Isla del Sol, on the Titicaca excursions that leave from Copacabana. The island thus brings together several layers of its past: the Inca sanctuary, the living Aymara inheritance, the episodes of the 20th century and its present as heritage worth preserving for future generations.