The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders in South America
8 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical archaeological wonders in South America are Nazca Lines (Peru), Sillustani (Peru) and Paracas Candelabra (Peru). The list covers 8 archaeological wonders in 3 countries. Peru has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America's ancient cultures left marks whose purpose still escapes certainty. Lines drawn across desert plains that make sense only from the air, burial towers on lonely headlands, figures guarding the dead from cliff ledges: these sites draw on the same landscapes that made them possible, the rainless coastal deserts of Peru and Chile, the high altiplano and the cloud forests of the northern Andes. What makes them mystical is not legend but the honest gaps in what is known about them.
The Nazca Lines, scraped into the desert by the Nazca culture roughly two thousand years ago, include a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider drawn at a scale that is hard to read from the ground. The Paracas Candelabra is a giant three-pronged figure cut into a hillside above the Bay of Pisco, visible from the sea, and its age and meaning remain disputed. In Chile, the Atacama Giant is the largest known prehistoric human figure drawn on a hill, its head crowned with rays.
Other sites belong to the dead. At Sillustani, tall stone funerary towers called chullpas stand on a peninsula above Lake Umayo near Puno. In the cloud forests of Amazonas, the Chachapoya placed the Sarcophagi of Karajía, clay figures with painted faces, high on a cliff, and built the tombs of Revash like tiny painted houses tucked into a rock face. On Easter Island, the fifteen moai of Ahu Tongariki stand with their backs to the ocean, while the Ingá Stone in Brazil is covered in carved symbols whose meaning nobody has deciphered.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 2 | Sillustani | Necropolis | Peru | |
| 3 | Paracas Candelabra | Geoglyph | Peru | |
| 4 | Ahu Tongariki | Megalith | Chile | |
| 5 | Atacama Giant | Geoglyph | Chile | |
| 6 | Ingá Stone | Petroglyph | Brazil | |
| 7 | Sarcophagi of Karajía | Necropolis | Peru | |
| 8 | Revash | Necropolis | Peru |
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 Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent roughly forty years on foot in the Peruvian desert measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines from a rented broom cupboard of a house nearby, and it was her work that popularized the idea that the lines formed a giant celestial calendar — tracking solstices, marking the paths of stars, even predicting eclipses.
Did you know? The lines were made by removing a top layer of reddish-brown, iron-oxide-coated stones to expose the yellow-grey ground beneath, usually only 10 to 15 cm deep.
02 Sillustani
Peru · 18.2 km from Puno15.721° S 70.158° W
Unukorno · CC BY 3.0 On the grassy slopes above Lake Umayo, high on the Peruvian Altiplano, stand the stone burial towers of Sillustani. Some are squat and ruined, others rise as tall, carefully dressed stone cylinders, and against the wide blue of the lake and the bare hills of the plateau they form one of the most haunting funerary landscapes in the Andes.
Did you know? Peru's tourism inventory counts 91 funerary towers spread over roughly 60 hectares of the peninsula, along with terraces, corrals, stairways and carved stones.
03 Paracas Candelabra
Candelabro de Paracas
Peru · 13.4 km from Pisco13.794° S 76.309° W
Alex Zanuccoli · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Paracas Candelabra is a colossal figure drawn on the sandy northern slope of the Paracas Peninsula, facing Pisco Bay on the southern coast of Peru. It looks like a three-branched candlestick, or a trident, which is why it also goes by the names El Candelabro, Tridente and Tres Cruces.
Did you know? According to local legend, the trident is the lightning rod of the creator god Viracocha.
04 Ahu Tongariki
Chile27.126° S 109.277° W
The original uploader was Hhooper1 at English Wikipedia . · CC BY 2.5 Fifteen giants stand shoulder to shoulder at Ahu Tongariki, their backs to the Pacific and their faces turned towards the grassy plain that once held a village. It is the largest ceremonial platform on Rapa Nui: the central stone terrace runs for almost a hundred metres, and with its lateral wings the whole structure once stretched to about two hundred.
Did you know? The 1960 tsunami that wrecked Ahu Tongariki crossed some 3,700 km of ocean from Chile, arrived about six hours later and pushed fallen moai more than 100 metres inland.
05 Atacama Giant
Gigante de Atacama
Chile · 39.6 km from Pozo Almonte19.949° S 69.633° W
Sznegra · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Atacama Giant is a human figure laid out on the western slope of Cerro Unita, an isolated hill rising from the pampa of the Tarapacá region in northern Chile.
Did you know? Chilean heritage authorities give the figure a height of about 86 metres and an area of some 3,000 square metres, smaller than the widely quoted 119 metres.
06 Ingá Stone
Pedra do Ingá
Brazil · 34.2 km from Campina Grande7.325° S 35.585° W
Image by IgorSuassuna from Pixabay The Ingá Stone — Pedra do Ingá, or Itacoatiara do Ingá, from the Tupi for "painted" or "scratched stone" — is a long outcrop of gneiss lying in the bed of the Ingá river in the interior of Paraíba, north-eastern Brazil, and it carries one of the most remarkable sets of rock carvings in South America.
Did you know? According to tradition, local Potiguara people used the word itacoatiara when European colonists asked them what the marks on the rock meant.
07 Sarcophagi of Karajía
Sarcófagos de Karajía
Peru · 18.3 km from Chachapoyas6.162° S 78.021° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 High on a sheer cliff above a ravine in the mountains of northern Peru, a row of tall clay figures stands looking out over the valley. 5 metres high, each with a long face and a jutting, exaggerated jaw. Set in a shallow cave more than 200 metres above the bottom of the gorge, they were beyond the reach of looters, and as a result they are among the best-preserved monuments of their kind.
Did you know? The burial cave sits at around 2,550 metres above sea level, in a cliff above a gorge in the Utcubamba basin.
08 Revash
Mausoleos de Revash
Peru · 34.4 km from Chachapoyas6.541° S 77.856° W
EdsonFuentesMera · CC BY-SA 4.0 High on a limestone cliff above the Utcubamba valley in northern Peru, a row of small painted houses clings to a ledge as if a village had been shrunk and tucked into the rock. They are tombs.
Did you know? Archaeologists working inside the tombs found the skeletons of eleven adults and one child, along with musical instruments and tools made of bone.
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 most mystical archaeological wonders in South America?
- On our list, Nazca Lines (Peru) ranks first, followed by Sillustani (Peru) and Paracas Candelabra (Peru).
- Which country has the most archaeological wonders in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Peru (5), Chile (2) and Brazil (1).
- Who made the Nazca Lines and why?
- They were made by the Nazca culture, roughly between 500 BCE and 500 CE, by removing dark surface stones to expose lighter ground. Their purpose is still debated, with leading explanations tied to water, ritual walking and astronomy.
- Who were the Chachapoya?
- The Chachapoya were a people of the cloud forests of northern Peru, known for fortified settlements such as Kuélap and for burying their dead in cliff tombs and sarcophagi. The Inca conquered them in the late fifteenth century.
- Why do the moai of Ahu Tongariki face inland?
- Most moai on Easter Island stand with their backs to the sea and face the villages they protected, representing ancestors watching over their descendants. The statues at Ahu Tongariki were toppled in the past and re-erected in the 1990s.
- How many archaeological wonders are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 8 archaeological wonders in 3 countries. Peru has the most, with 5.