Mount Illimani looming over the village of Khapi. Photo: Mark Chilvers. Many believe Mt Illimani will have completely lost its glaciers in a few decades.

By James Painter, BBC News, Khapi, Bolivia Marcos Choque is a 67-year-old Aymara Indian with holes in his trousers and battered sandals. He appears remarkably cheerful. Sitting among his fellow villagers from Khapi, perched high up in the Bolivian Andes, he seems to delight in cracking jokes. But ask him about Illimani – the 6,400m (21,000-ft) mountain that towers above his village – and his mood turns more sombre. “When I was young, the snow often came down as far as there,” he says, pointing to the hills. “But in the past few years, the snow-line has risen 500m. It’s getting hotter, which is melting the mountain.” Mr Choque and the 40 families that make up his community have been watching Illimani with increasing alarm. They depend on it for part of their water supply – both to drink and to irrigate their small, terraced parcels of land. “We calculate that there will be no snow or ice left on Illimani in the next 30 or 40 years. It will be black, or what we call peeled of its whiteness,” he says. … “What’s happening at Khapi is typical of what hundreds of poor, indigenous and vulnerable communities throughout Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador are facing,” says Juan Carlos Alurrade, executive director of Agua Sustentable (Sustainable Water), which is helping communities to adapt to climate change. “They depend on glacial melt for irrigation, but the glaciers are doomed.”

Bolivia’s Indians feel the heat