The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in South America

19 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 San Agustin archeological park

   Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín

   Colombia1.884° N 76.296° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The statues range from small carvings to monumental figures. Many combine human and animal traits, with jaguars, crocodiles and bats among the creatures depicted, and they were once painted in red, yellow, black and white; traces of colour survive on a few. Most stood at the entrances of burial mounds and stone-slab tombs, and archaeologists read them as guardians of the dead; around the larger burial mounds, fiercer figures of snakes, frogs and birds keep watch. The tallest statue, at about seven metres, stands at the Alto de los Ídolos.

   Did you know? Archaeologists found Lavapatas only in 1937 and date the carved stream bed to roughly the 1st to 9th centuries AD.

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2. 02 Tiwanaku

   Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The ceremonial core is a group of platforms and enclosures. The Akapana is an artificial stepped platform about 16.5 m high, and excavations there have uncovered offerings of human and llama remains; a deep looters' pit still scars its top. Next to it, the Kalasasaya is a large rectangular enclosure. Inside stands the Gateway of the Sun, carved with a front-facing figure holding two staffs. It was probably moved there from somewhere else, and like other gateways at the site it was never finished. The sunken Semi-Subterranean Temple beside it is aligned north–south, and its walls are studded with carved stone heads in many different styles.

   Did you know? Andesite for facing stones and carvings was brought from the Copacabana Peninsula about 90 km away, while red sandstone came from a quarry about 10 km away.

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3. 03 Cueva de las Manos

   Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The pigments were entirely local chemistry: iron oxides for the reds and purples, kaolin clay for white, a mineral called natrojarosite for yellow, manganese oxide for black — a full palette pulled straight out of the surrounding Patagonian rock and soil rather than traded in from anywhere else.

   Did you know? Besides hands, the walls show guanacos being encircled by hunters, along with scenes of hunting with bolas.

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4. 04 Sacsayhuamán

   Saqsaywaman

   Peru · 2.2 km from Cuzco13.508° S 71.982° W

   

   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. They are built of enormous blocks, the largest estimated at between 128 and almost 200 tonnes, cut and fitted without mortar so tightly that in many places a sheet of paper will not go between them; the rounded corners, the interlocking shapes and the slight inward lean are thought to be why they have outlasted Cusco's earthquakes. Walk the length of the lower terrace to appreciate the scale, then climb to the top for the view over Cusco.

   Did you know? The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León wrote in 1553 that 20,000 workers served in rotation: 4,000 quarried the stone and 6,000 hauled it with ropes.

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5. 05 Chan Chan

   Peru · 6.2 km from Trujillo8.111° S 79.075° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   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. The centre is organised into ten great walled compounds, often called ciudadelas, each understood as the palace of a ruler, containing ceremonial courts, U-shaped administrative structures known as audiencias, storerooms, a water reservoir and a funerary platform with elite burials. The best known is Nik An, long called the Tschudi palace, whose walls carry many of the sea-themed friezes; others carry names such as Utzh An and Fochic An.

   Did you know? A sixteenth-century record lists treasure worth 80,000 pesos of gold taken from a single looted tomb at Chan Chan.

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6. 06 Machu Picchu

   Peru13.163° S 72.546° W

   

   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. The place was abandoned in the upheaval of the Spanish conquest and slowly overgrown, known to local farmers but not to the wider world.

   Did you know? The site was built over geological faults, which researchers think gave the Inca ready access to already fractured rock for building stone.

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7. 07 São Miguel das Missões

   Brazil · 38.6 km from Santo Ângelo28.549° S 54.556° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The mission was founded in 1632 by the Jesuit fathers Cristóvão de Mendoza and Pablo Benevidez, and in 1687 it was re-established on its present site. It grew quickly: more than 4,000 people lived here by 1690, and at its height the population approached 7,000. The church whose ruins dominate the site was designed by the Italian Jesuit architect Giovanni Battista Primoli and built between 1735 and 1750 from local sandstone, in a Baroque idiom adapted to the materials and skills available on the frontier. Its construction ended just as the Treaty of Madrid of 1750 transferred the territory from Spain to Portugal and ordered the Guarani to leave.

   Did you know? Instead of classical acanthus, the church's capitals are carved with artichoke leaves, and fruits of a native plant decorate its facades.

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8. 08 Kuélap

   Peru · 21.6 km from Chachapoyas6.418° S 77.923° W

   

   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. Inside, on raised platforms, lie the remains of more than four hundred buildings, and almost all of them are round, a striking contrast with the rectangular architecture of the Inca. Many of the circular houses are banded with friezes in rhomboid and zigzag patterns, set under projecting stone cornices that once kept off the rain.

   Did you know? Some of the finely dressed limestone blocks in the outer wall are estimated to weigh as much as three tonnes.

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9. 09 San Ignacio Miní

   Ruinas Jesuíticas de San Ignacio Mini

   Argentina · 21.6 km from Hohenau27.255° S 55.532° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The mission was first set up around 1610 by the Jesuit priests José Cataldino and Simón Maceta in the Guayrá region, in today's Brazilian state of Paraná. Raids by slave-hunting bandeirantes forced it to move in 1632, and it reached its present site only in 1696. The name Miní, Guaraní for small, distinguished it from the larger San Ignacio Guazú in Paraguay. In the eighteenth century around 3,000 people lived here, most of them Guaraní, producing crafts that were traded along the nearby Paraná River. The Jesuits left in 1768, after their expulsion from the Spanish dominions, and in 1817 Luso-Brazilian troops destroyed the town along with other missions in the region.

   Did you know? The Jesuits trained and organised Guaraní militias to defend the missions against the raiding parties from São Paulo.

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10. 10 El Fuerte de Samaipata

    Bolivia · 5.2 km from Samaipata18.178° S 63.819° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The carving began long before the Incas. The Chané, an Arawak-speaking people, occupied the site from around 300 AD and started shaping the rock into a ceremonial centre. In the late 15th century, probably towards the end of the reign of Tupac Yupanqui, the Inca empire absorbed the area and Samaipata may have served as a provincial capital, with all the buildings that status required. The Incas laid out a trapezoidal plaza about 100 metres on each side and built a kallanka, a great hall some 70 metres long and 16 metres wide. On the rock itself, a row of 18 niches known as the "priests' choir" and a band of 21 rectangular niches at its base are among the best-preserved features.

    Did you know? A 17th-century Spanish chronicler wrote that an Inca relative of Tupac Yupanqui named Guacane won the local lord Grigota and his people over with lavish gifts rather than war.

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11. 11 Moray

    Peru · 9.1 km from Urubamba13.329° S 72.196° W

    

    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. The stone retaining walls of each terrace do double duty as thermal batteries, soaking up heat during the day and releasing it slowly at night to buffer the crops against the sharp Andean frost.

    Did you know? The site holds several terraced hollows rather than one, and the deepest of them sinks roughly 30 metres below the plateau rim.

    More about Moray →

12. 12 Huaca de la Luna

    Peru · 3.6 km from Trujillo8.135° S 78.991° W

    

    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. While the Huaca del Sol seems to have housed administrative and residential functions and was partly destroyed and looted under Spanish rule, the Huaca de la Luna was a ceremonial centre and survived far better.

    Did you know? In the early seventeenth century Spanish colonists diverted the Moche River against the Huaca del Sol to wash out its gold, destroying about two-thirds of it.

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13. 13 Pedra Furada

    Brazil8.833° S 42.553° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In the shelter's floor the excavators found hearths with charcoal and quartz and quartzite pieces they read as stone tools. Radiocarbon dating put the oldest layers at roughly 48,000 to 32,000 years ago, and later series of dates extended the sequence further back. If people were here then, the idea that the Americas were first settled around the time of the Clovis culture, some 13,000 years ago, could not stand. Critics answered that the charcoal could come from natural wildfires and that the "tools" could be stones broken by falling from the cliff; one study even noted that wild bearded capuchin monkeys in the park smash stones and produce flakes that resemble early human tools.

    Did you know? Excavators reported a symmetrical, hexagonal flaked stone, clearly shaped by people, in a layer dated to roughly 24,000 to 27,600 years ago.

    More about Pedra Furada →

14. 14 Pisac Archeological Park

    Písac

    Peru · 19 km from Cuzco13.409° S 71.843° W

    

    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. Many scholars see it as one of his royal estates, like Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu: at once a country residence for the ruler and his lineage, a religious centre, an observatory, a refuge and a memorial of his victory over the Cuyo people. Its position also commanded a route from the empire's heartland to the edge of the eastern rainforest.

    Did you know? About 500 farming terraces climb the mountain spur, some of their stone retaining walls rising around six metres high.

    More about Pisac Archeological Park →

15. 15 Ciudad Perdida

    Colombia · 35.6 km from Ciénaga11.038° N 73.925° W

    

    The way in sets the tone. The final approach is a climb of about 1,200 moss-covered stone steps through dense forest, and only at the top does the main sequence of terraces open up, with the mountains rising all around. The Tairona abandoned the town in the sixteenth century, in the upheaval that followed the Spanish conquest, and the forest closed over it.

    Did you know? The looters who stumbled on it nicknamed the overgrown site Green Hell.

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16. 16 Choquequirao

    Peru · 27.2 km from Abancay13.395° S 72.872° W

    

    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. Most striking are the agricultural terraces that step down the slopes, some of them decorated with figures of llamas made in white stone set into the darker walls: a file of more than twenty animals climbing the hillside, with a single herder at the bottom – a design known from no other Inca site.

    Did you know? The white llama figures in the terrace walls stand between about 1.25 and 1.94 metres tall, made of pale quartz sandstone set against dark schist.

    More about Choquequirao →

17. 17 Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná

    Paraguay · 7.2 km from Hohenau27.132° S 55.702° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The mission was founded in 1706 by Guaraní families who came from the older mission of San Carlos, today in Argentina. The Jesuit architect Juan Bautista Prímoli designed the main church and the plan of the whole settlement, which was conceived as a self-sufficient town. Everything was arranged around a broad central plaza used for processions, festivals and weddings: the great church and its cemetery and orchards on one side, a school and workshops nearby, and long rows of stone-arched dwellings for the Guaraní facing the square. By 1728 around 3,000 people lived here.

    Did you know? Until musical scores were found in the Bolivian missions of Moxos, the angel frieze at Trinidad was the main surviving evidence of music in the Jesuit missions.

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18. 18 Tierradentro

    Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro

    Colombia2.583° N 76.033° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The tombs cluster on ridges and flattened hilltops around the village of San Andrés de Pisimbalá in the municipality of Inzá, Cauca, while the people who built them lived on the river terraces below. The park's principal groups are at Alto de Segovia, Alto del Duende, Alto de San Andrés, Alto del Aguacate and El Tablón, the last known for its stone figures. A typical hypogeum is entered from the west down a spiral staircase to a main chamber some 5 to 8 metres below ground, ringed by smaller side niches; carved pillars and walls reproduce the interior of a dwelling.

    Did you know? About 162 hypogea have been excavated within the national archaeological park.

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19. 19 Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo

    Ollantaytambo

    Peru · 17.1 km from Urubamba13.256° S 72.266° W

    

    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. On the main grid, each block was formed of walled compounds with buildings around a central courtyard.

    Did you know? Manco Inca rode into the counterattack on a captured Spanish horse, while some of his warriors fought with seized swords, bucklers and armour.

    More about Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo →