In its heyday, the Pastoruri glacier in central Peru, drew daily throngs of tourists packed into dozens of double-decker buses 16,000-feet (5,0000-meters) high into the Andes to ski, build snowmen and scale its dizzying peaks.

But in less than 20 years, including at least 10 of the hottest on record, Pastoruri has shrunk in half, and now spans just a third of a square mile (0.9 square km).

Melting ice has given way to slabs of black rock, two small lakes gathering the glacial runoff have swollen together, and officials have banned climbing on the unstable formation.

"There isn't much left of our great tourist attraction," said local guide Valerio Huerta.

In response, locals are making a bid to lure tourists back to Pastoruri before it is gone completely - likely in a decade.

Instead of marketing Pastoruri as the pristine Andean winter wonderland it once was, the peak is being rebranded as a place to see climate change in action with a "climate change route" launching in March.

The dwindling number of visitors to Pastoruri - 34,000 last year compared to an estimated 100,000 per year in the 1990s - has eroded tourism earnings that support thousands in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru's most popular cluster of snowy peaks.

Reuters