An abandoned boat rests on the cracked earth where it used to float. Lake Poopo, once Bolivia’s second-largest, is mostly gone — bringing with it a centuries-old culture that relies entirely on its wealth.

Felix Mauricio, a member of the Uru indigenous community, was a former fisherman. The 82-year-old looks out over a barren landscape and chews coca leaves to suppress hunger.

“The fish were big. A small fish weighed three kilos,” he remembers the good old days.

At its peak in 1986, Lake Poopo covered about 3,500 square kilometers (1,350 sq mi) – an area more than twice the size of Greater London.

But by the end of 2015, it had “completely evaporated,” according to a timeline from the European Space Agency of satellite imagery tracking the lake’s decline.

Scientific studies blame a combination of factors, including climate change and water abstraction for agriculture and mining in the area on the Bolivian plateaus, some 3,700 meters above sea level.

“Here was the lake… It dried up quickly,” Mauricio told AFP, kneeling on the dry bed and playing with a miniature wooden boat he’d carved himself – pushing it around with a wistful look, like a kid that got lost in an imaginary world.

Mauricio has always lived in Punaca Tinta Maria, a village in the southwestern region of Oruro.

His grandparents settled in the area in 1915, at a time when Lake Poopo was lapping at front doors and temporarily flooding cottages.

Mauricio is one of just seven families left in Punaca Tinta Maria, who used to have 84 of them, according to locals.

According to a 2013 survey, there are only about 600 members of the indigenous Uru community — which dates back thousands of years in Bolivia and Peru — in Punaca Tinta Maria and the neighboring settlements of Llapallapani and Vilaneque.

“Many have lived here before,” says Cristina Mauricio, a resident of Punaca Tinta Maria, who estimates her age at 50.

“They’re gone. There’s no work.”

Rainfalls since 2015 have brought back a shallow sheet of water to parts of the lake, but not enough to navigate or hold the fish or waterfowl that the Uru — who still call themselves “merpeople” — used to catch and hunt.

With nothing left of the lake’s natural offerings, the Uru have had to learn new skills and today work as masons or miners, some growing quinoa or other small crops.

A major problem is that the Uru have little access to land.

Their villages are surrounded by members of another indigenous community called the Aimara, who jealously guard the farmland they occupy with government title deeds.

The state has announced plans to allocate land to the Uru as well, but the community claims most of it is barren and useless.

What remains of the lake is mostly an evaporated bed of salt that the village’s remaining residents had hoped would be Poopo’s final gift to them.

They banded together and invested what little they could find into equipment for a small factory to mine and refine the salt.

But they hit an unforeseen snag: They couldn’t raise the $500 needed to purchase sacks to pack the salt.

Business has stalled.

“The Urus will disappear if we don’t heed the warnings,” said Senator Lindaura Rasguido of Bolivia’s ruling MAS party in October during a visit to the community.

She and her delegation were greeted with traditional dances and poems in a language that few speak anymore.

“Who knew the lake would dry up? Our parents trusted Lake Poopo… It had fish, birds, eggs, everything. He was our source of life,” lamented Luis Valero, the spiritual leader of the Uru in the region.

As his five children chased each other around an unused canoe that had landed in front of the family’s mud hut, the 38-year-old thought, “We’ve been orphaned.”

But Mauricio, who wears a traditional poncho and hat made from totora, a local reed used to make boats, still hopes things will go back to the way they once were.

Staring at the bare ground he once navigated through waves and wind, he told AFP that the lake “will return. He’ll be back in five or six years,” he insisted with more hope than confidence.

A 2020 study in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment says global annual mean evaporation rates from lakes are projected to increase by 16 percent by 2100.

And according to the UN, the number of people living in water-stressed areas will increase from 1.9 billion in the early to mid-2010s to between 2.7 and 3.2 billion people by 2050.

Natural disasters displaced 30.7 million people within their own countries in 2020, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.