The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Peru
14 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the greatest archaeological wonders in Peru are Nazca Lines, Sacsayhuamán and Sillustani. The list covers 14 archaeological wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Peru's archaeology is shaped by extremes of climate. Along the coast lies one of the driest deserts on Earth, where adobe cities, painted walls and lines scraped into the ground have survived because rain almost never falls. Above it rise the Andes, where the Inca and the cultures before them fitted stone without mortar, terraced whole mountainsides and built at altitudes few other civilizations attempted. To the northeast, in the cloud forests, the Chachapoya people raised walled towns and cliff tombs of their own.
On the southern desert the Nazca Lines draw a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider and long straight tracks across the plain, best understood from the air, and the Paracas Candelabra is cut into a hillside above the bay. Near Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú kingdom and one of the largest adobe cities ever built, while the Moche temple of Huaca de la Luna still shows layers of painted reliefs.
In the highlands, Machu Picchu sits on a ridge above the Urubamba, built in the 15th century for the Inca ruler Pachacuti, and Choquequirao spreads across a remote spur of the same mountains. Above Cusco, the zigzag walls of Sacsayhuamán are made of enormous blocks fitted with startling precision. Moray's concentric terraces descend like an amphitheatre into the ground, and at Pisac terraces climb steep slopes towards a citadel. By Lake Umayo near Titicaca stand the burial towers of Sillustani, and in the north the fortress-city of Kuélap and the clay sarcophagi of Karajía watch over deep valleys.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | ✓ |
| 2 | Sacsayhuamán | Archaeological site | |
| 3 | Sillustani | Necropolis | |
| 4 | Chan Chan | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 5 | Paracas Candelabra | Geoglyph | |
| 6 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Kuélap | Fortress | |
| 8 | Moray | Terraced fields | |
| 9 | Huaca de la Luna | Archaeological site | |
| 10 | Pisac Archeological Park | Archaeological site | |
| 11 | Choquequirao | Archaeological site | |
| 12 | Sarcophagi of Karajía | Necropolis | |
| 13 | Revash | Necropolis | |
| 14 | Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo | Archaeological site |
01 Nazca Lines
Líneas de Nazca
Peru · 25.6 km from Nasca14.697° S 75.135° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay The problem, as archaeoastronomers Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded after a rigorous statistical review in 1990, is that there are so many lines running in so many different directions across the desert that some of them are going to line up with an astronomically significant point on the horizon purely by chance — with enough lines pointed in enough directions, you can always find an alignment if you look for one.
Did you know? The geoglyphs were made between about 500 BC and AD 500, the earliest by the Paracas culture before the Nazca.
02 Sacsayhuamán
Saqsaywaman
Peru · 2.2 km from Cuzco13.508° S 71.982° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 What you come to see are the three massive terrace walls beside a great plaza that could hold thousands of people. The longest is about 400 m, and the walls stand around 6 m tall.
Did you know? In the 1536 siege of Cusco it was the main base of Manco Inca's army, estimated at 100,000 or more, against about 190 Spaniards.
03 Sillustani
Peru · 18.2 km from Puno15.721° S 70.158° W
Unukorno · CC BY 3.0 These towers, known as chullpas, were built to hold the dead above ground rather than below it. Each one sheltered the remains of an entire family group, most likely of noble rank, laid in a crouched, foetal position; the cold, dry air of the plateau preserved many of the bodies naturally. The doorways are small and almost always face east, towards the rising sun.
Did you know? The Jesuit lexicographer Ludovico Bertonio recorded in 1612 that Aymara speakers called the stone towers uta amaya, houses of the soul.
04 Chan Chan
Peru · 6.2 km from Trujillo8.111° S 79.075° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 Building began around 850 CE, and from roughly 900 the city was the seat of Chimor, a kingdom of the north Peruvian coast. At its height its dense core of about 6 square kilometres may have held 40,000 to 60,000 people.
Did you know? The palace walls narrow from about five metres at the base to one metre at the top, a profile thought to help them survive earthquakes.
05 Paracas Candelabra
Candelabro de Paracas
Peru · 13.4 km from Pisco13.794° S 76.309° W
Alex Zanuccoli · CC BY-SA 2.0 Who made it, and why, is still debated. Pottery found close by has been dated to around 200 BC, the time of the Paracas culture, and Maria Reiche, the great researcher of the Nazca lines, studied the figure in the 1950s and linked it to the great geoglyphs further south. Stones laid around its edges may be later additions.
Did you know? Maria Reiche is said to have spent about six months in the 1950s measuring the figure and analysing the direction in which it points.
06 Machu Picchu
Peru13.163° S 72.546° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The estate was built in the 15th century, most likely for the Inca emperor Pachacuti after his conquest of the Urubamba valley, as a royal retreat rather than a town. Radiocarbon dating of human remains places its occupation from around 1420 to about 1530. Perhaps 750 people lived there, mostly retainers drawn from many parts of the empire; genetic studies show that they came from the Andes, the coast, Ecuador and Amazonia.
Did you know? Machu Picchu sits at about 2,430 metres, more than 1,000 metres lower than Cusco, which gave it a noticeably milder climate than the Inca capital.
07 Kuélap
Peru · 21.6 km from Chachapoyas6.418° S 77.923° W
Elemaki · CC BY-SA 2.5 The walls are the first marvel, and the way into them the second. Kuélap has three entrances, and the main one is a deep, tapering passage between high walls that narrows until only one person can pass at a time, a design that made the interior easy to defend and gives arriving visitors a sense of being funnelled into another world.
Did you know? The highest sector, Pueblo Alto, could only be entered through two narrow gaps in a wall 11.5 metres high.
08 Moray
Peru · 9.1 km from Urubamba13.329° S 72.196° W
Image by JustinW from Pixabay The leading theory is that this wasn't ornamental at all but a working agricultural research station: a place to test how different crops and even different varieties of the same crop — dozens of native potato and maize types — performed under specific combinations of sun exposure, wind, humidity, and soil before deciding what to plant where across the wider realm.
Did you know? Anthropologist John Earls identified upright stones on the terraces that seem to mark sunset shadows at the equinoxes and solstices; locals call them ñustas, or princesses.
09 Huaca de la Luna
Peru · 3.6 km from Trujillo8.135° S 78.991° W
Burkhard Mücke · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple was built by the Moche, a culture that dominated the valleys of Peru's northern coast between about the first and ninth centuries AD. Together with the far larger Huaca del Sol across the plain, it formed the core of the Moche capital known today as Cerro Blanco.
Did you know? Sacrifices linked to El Niño rains followed a different rite, with the throat cut and the body defleshed and put on display.
10 Pisac Archeological Park
Písac
Peru · 19 km from Cuzco13.409° S 71.843° W
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pottery shows that the area was settled before the Incas, but the complex visible today is generally attributed to the emperor Pachacuti, who reigned from 1438 and is thought to have built it after about 1440.
Did you know? Water for the ritual baths was brought by canal from a small lake at about 4,500 metres and carried across a gorge on a 20-metre-high aqueduct.
11 Choquequirao
Peru · 27.2 km from Abancay13.395° S 72.872° W
Bryan Dougherty (bryand_nyc) from New York City, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 The ruins are spread over a huge area, around 1,800 hectares, and only part has been cleared from the forest – estimates put the excavated share at a third or so. What has been uncovered includes ceremonial plazas, halls and houses, canals and fountains that brought water from a stream some four kilometres away, and a usnu, a ceremonial platform built on a levelled hilltop.
Did you know? Local quarries yielded only metamorphic rock unsuited to fine Inca masonry, so walls were plastered with clay and painted a light orange.
12 Sarcophagi of Karajía
Sarcófagos de Karajía
Peru · 18.3 km from Chachapoyas6.162° S 78.021° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The figures are a type the Chachapoya made for their honoured dead, known as purunmachus. Each is a hollow shell built of clay mixed with sticks and stones around a seated, wrapped mummy; only the head and upper chest are solid. They were coated in white and painted in yellow ochre and two shades of red with details of clothing, ornaments and the body, and several of them carry real human skulls set on top of their heads.
Did you know? Once the fallen figure opened holes in its neighbours, rodents and birds of prey got in and disturbed one of the burials.
13 Revash
Mausoleos de Revash
Peru · 34.4 km from Chachapoyas6.541° S 77.856° W
EdsonFuentesMera · CC BY-SA 4.0 The mausoleums were built of stones set in mud mortar on rectangular plans, some with one storey and some with two, each sharing walls with its neighbours and backing directly onto the rock. They have no front doors, only side openings, and windows shaped like a T, a cross or a square.
Did you know? Revash represents just one of several Chachapoya ways of burying the dead, used here for communal tombs rather than individual graves.
14 Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo
Ollantaytambo
Peru · 17.1 km from Urubamba13.256° S 72.266° W
EdsonFuentesMera · CC BY-SA 4.0 The site was occupied long before the Incas, but around the middle of the fifteenth century the emperor Pachacuti conquered the existing town, razed it and rebuilt it as the centre of his personal estate. He had the Urubamba valley terraced and irrigated; the terraces here were built to an unusually high standard, with tall walls of cut stone, and were worked by the emperor's retainers while the town housed members of the Inca nobility.
Did you know? The Spanish retreat turned into a rout, and Francisco Pizarro's cousin Pedro Pizarro was nearly killed when his horse died under him.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the greatest archaeological wonders in Peru?
- On our list, Nazca Lines ranks first, followed by Sacsayhuamán and Sillustani.
- Who made the Nazca Lines?
- They were made by the Nazca culture, mostly between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. The figures were created by removing the reddish surface stones of the desert to expose lighter ground beneath, and the dry, windless climate has preserved them.
- What was Moray used for?
- Moray is a set of Inca terraces built in deep circular depressions. Because the temperature differs from the top to the bottom, it is widely thought to have served for agricultural experimentation, though its exact purpose is not recorded.
- When was Machu Picchu built?
- Machu Picchu was built in the mid-15th century as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti and was abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest.
- How many archaeological wonders are on this list in Peru?
- The list covers 14 archaeological wonders.