The Most Mystical Places in South America
14 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical places in South America are Nazca Lines (Peru), Las Lajas Sanctuary (Colombia) and Christ the Redeemer (Brazil). The list covers 14 mystical places in 6 countries. Peru has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America's mystical places draw on a long and layered past. Pre-Columbian cultures drew giant figures on desert plains, raised funerary towers on high plateaus and set their dead on cliff ledges, Polynesian voyagers carved ancestor statues on a remote Pacific island, and later centuries added pilgrimage churches and deserted settlements. Dry deserts and isolated highlands have kept much of this intact, so the sense of mystery often comes from the place as much as the monument.
The desert drawings are the most famous. The Nazca Lines in southern Peru trace hummingbirds, monkeys and straight lines across the plain, best seen from the air, while the Paracas Candelabra is etched into a hillside facing the sea. In Chile's Atacama Desert, the Atacama Giant is a vast human figure on the slope of Cerro Unitas. Peru adds the funerary towers of Sillustani above Lake Umayo and the Sarcophagi of Karajía, clay figures of the Chachapoya set high on a cliff face, and in Brazil the Ingá Stone is covered in carved symbols whose meaning remains unknown.
Faith and abandonment shape the rest. Las Lajas Sanctuary in Colombia is a neo-Gothic church built across the gorge of the Guáitara River, and Christ the Redeemer has stood above Rio de Janeiro since 1931. On Easter Island, the fifteen moai of Ahu Tongariki stand with their backs to the ocean. Villa Epecuén in Argentina is a spa town that disappeared under a lake and later re-emerged as a ghost town, Grytviken in South Georgia keeps a former whaling station and the grave of Ernest Shackleton, and the Gruta do Lago Azul hides a deep blue lake inside a cave.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 2 | Las Lajas Sanctuary | Pilgrimage site | Colombia | |
| 3 | Christ the Redeemer | Sculpture | Brazil | |
| 4 | Sillustani | Necropolis | Peru | |
| 5 | Grytviken | Ghost town | South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands | |
| 6 | Paracas Candelabra | Geoglyph | Peru | |
| 7 | Villa Epecuén | Abandoned village | Argentina | |
| 8 | Ahu Tongariki | Megalith | Chile | |
| 9 | Atacama Giant | Geoglyph | Chile | |
| 10 | Ingá Stone | Petroglyph | Brazil | |
| 11 | Gruta do Lago Azul | Cenote | Brazil | |
| 12 | Sarcophagi of Karajía | Necropolis | Peru | |
| 13 | Revash | Necropolis | Peru | |
| 14 | Poço Encantado | Cenote | Brazil |
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 Las Lajas Sanctuary
Colombia · 7.6 km from Ipiales0.805° N 77.586° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1754 a woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was caught in a storm in the Guáitara canyon with her deaf-mute daughter Rosa. They sheltered in a cave, and María later told her neighbours that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her on the rock wall — and that in the same moment, her daughter, unable to hear or speak since birth, called out to her.
Did you know? Beneath the church, inside the base of the bridge, lies a vaulted crypt in Romanesque style dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
03 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa won the 1922 competition to design it, then spent years in Europe developing the plans, where he brought on French sculptor Paul Landowski — who ended up designing the head and hands — while the face itself was modeled by a Romanian-born sculptor, Gheorghe Leonida.
Did you know? The statue is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its outstretched arms span 28 metres, and it weighs about 635 tonnes.
04 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.
05 Grytviken
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands54.281° S 36.508° W
Lexaxis7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of a sheltered cove on the island of South Georgia, the rusting tanks and machinery of an abandoned whaling station spread along the shore, old whale catchers lie beached at the water's edge, and a small Norwegian church stands apart behind them.
Did you know? Solveig Jacobsen, daughter of a station manager, was born here on 8 October 1913 and is recorded as the first child born south of the Antarctic Convergence.
06 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.
07 Villa Epecuén
Argentina · 8.9 km from Carhué37.132° S 62.810° W
Image by azorko from Pixabay Villa Epecuén was a spa town on the shore of a salt lake in the pampas of Buenos Aires Province. Its founder, Arturo Vatteone, opened the first bathing establishment on 23 January 1921, and the town grew quickly around the lake, whose water is almost as salty as the Dead Sea and was promoted for its healing powers.
Did you know? The 1985 flood was triggered by a seiche, a rare standing wave driven by unusual weather, which broke a nearby dam.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 Gruta do Lago Azul
Monumento Natural da Gruta do Lago Azul
Brazil21.145° S 56.592° W
Luiz Felipe Sahd · CC BY-SA 3.0 Gruta do Lago Azul, the Blue Lake Cave, opens in the limestone hills outside Bonito in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul as a wide mouth in the forest, about 40 metres across. A path of roughly 300 steps leads down a steep, sloping chamber hung with stalactites to the cave's prize at the bottom: a still underground lake more than 50 metres long whose water is a blue so saturated that it looks lit from within.
Did you know? A tiny blind crustacean from the lake, Potiicoara brasiliensis, was just the second living species ever discovered in its entire order, Spelaeogriphacea.
12 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.
13 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.
14 Poço Encantado
Brazil12.945° S 41.105° W
Cesar Monteiro · CC BY-SA 4.0 For a few months each year, a shaft of sunlight slips through a crack in the roof of a cave in the Chapada Diamantina and lands on a pool of water so clear that it seems not to be there at all. The beam strikes the bottom and the whole lake lights up in an intense, electric blue, while rocks and fallen boulders many metres down appear close enough to touch.
Did you know? The blind catfish of the pool was once thought to live only here, but later studies found it in a regional underground aquifer that also reaches other caves.
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 places in South America?
- On our list, Nazca Lines (Peru) ranks first, followed by Las Lajas Sanctuary (Colombia) and Christ the Redeemer (Brazil).
- Which country has the most mystical places in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Peru (5), Brazil (4) and Chile (2).
- Who made the Nazca Lines?
- The Nazca Lines were made by the Nazca culture, which flourished in southern Peru between roughly 500 BC and AD 500. The figures were created by removing the reddish surface stones to expose the lighter ground beneath.
- What happened to Villa Epecuén?
- In 1985 the waters of Lake Epecuén broke through protective barriers and flooded the Argentine resort town, which was left submerged for decades. As the water receded in the 2000s, its ruins came back into view.
- Why were the moai at Ahu Tongariki restored?
- The statues had been toppled in the past, and a tsunami in 1960 scattered them further inland. They were re-erected in the 1990s in a Chilean-Japanese restoration project.
- How many mystical places are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 14 mystical places in 6 countries. Peru has the most, with 5.