Verso un’estetica sostanziale del paesaggio. Imparare dalle Ande?

This essay aims to contribute to overcoming the aestheticized concept of landscape prevalent in European culture, towards a substantial and holistic concept of landscape. I will do so by considering the multi-layered landscape of the Central Andes, whose peculiar aesthetics still speaks of a solidarity of ontology, ethics, and aesthetics. First, I will emphasize the role of travel experiences not only for geographical investigations, but also for the conceptual clarification of landscape. Second, I will describe my travel in the Huancavelica region to emphasise the importance of aesthetic impressions for cognition. Third, I will apply Berque’s distinction between landscape thinking cultures and landscape thought cultures to the case of the Central Andes landscape. In the last section, I will underline the novelty represented by the adoption by local institutions of the Unesco label «associative cultural landscape» to refer to Cerro Tambraico valley, which is external to the mass tourism paths and still maintains its sacred meaning for local people