puna
/ˈpuːnə
/noun
1A high treeless plateau in the Peruvian Andes.The empty expanses of the puna, as the grasslands are called in the Andes, correspond to the silence in which we walked....
- Our route takes us along the Tambo Mayo River - still white with ice by late morning, where even the waterfalls are frozen, and on to the windswept puna.
- Up again to a cold puna crossed by another frozen river and dotted with many llamas.
2 another term for altitude sickness.
Origin
Via American Spanish from Quechua.