A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
llano
A llano is a plain, and in the Americas it names two great ones. The Llanos of Venezuela and Colombia are a vast tropical grassland along the Orinoco that floods in the wet season and bakes in the dry. The Llano Estacado of west Texas and eastern New Mexico is a high tableland so flat and so featureless that it is one of the largest surfaces of its kind on the continent, with the Caprock escarpment falling away at its edges.
Etymology
The word is Spanish for flat or level, from the Latin for a plain, which is also the source of English plain and plane. The name of the Llano Estacado is argued over: estacado means staked or palisaded, and the readings offered include stakes driven in to mark a route across country with no landmarks, the palisade-like appearance of the escarpment, and a mistranslation of an older description.
Notes
What makes the Llano Estacado remarkable is the absence of relief. Early Spanish accounts describe crossing it as being like a sea, with no way to keep a bearing, and Coronado’s chroniclers wrote that the grass stood back up behind the horses and left no trail to follow home. The Venezuelan llanos support one of the great concentrations of waterbirds anywhere in the world during the dry season, when the water pulls back into scattered pools.