The Most Remarkable Geoglyphs in the World
7 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable geoglyphs in the world are Nazca Lines (Peru), Uffington White Horse (United Kingdom) and Cerne Abbas Giant (United Kingdom). The list covers 7 geoglyphs in 5 countries. Peru has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A geoglyph is a figure drawn on the land itself, at a scale meant for the sky or the far horizon rather than for someone standing beside it. Some were made by clearing dark surface stones to expose paler ground, others by cutting turf down to white chalk or by piling earth into long low banks. Their force comes from that mismatch of scale: lines that look like a path on the ground resolve into a bird, a horse or a serpent only from a hillside or the air, and many have survived simply because the desert or the downland around them was left alone.
Among the places here are the Nazca Lines in southern Peru, where the Nazca culture drew animals, plants and long straight lines across the desert floor. Nearby, the Paracas Candelabra is cut into a sandy slope facing the sea. In England, the Uffington White Horse is a stylised chalk figure of Bronze Age origin, and the Cerne Abbas Giant stands on a Dorset hillside. Serpent Mound in Ohio is an effigy earthwork shaped as a coiling snake, the Atacama Giant spreads across a hill in northern Chile, and the Cœur de Voh in New Caledonia is a natural heart-shaped clearing in a mangrove swamp.
Places are selected by how they look and ordered by beauty. Each comes with its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section is also divided into pages by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 2 | Uffington White Horse | Geoglyph | United Kingdom | |
| 3 | Cerne Abbas Giant | Geoglyph | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Paracas Candelabra | Geoglyph | Peru | |
| 5 | Serpent Mound | Geoglyph | United States | |
| 6 | Atacama Giant | Geoglyph | Chile | |
| 7 | Cœur de Voh | Geoglyph | New Caledonia |
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. It's a serious, carefully argued theory built on genuine field data, and it's also the one most contemporary archaeoastronomers think is probably wrong.
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 Uffington White Horse
United Kingdom · 29.4 km from Oxford51.578° N 1.567° W
Vieve Forward · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Uffington White Horse is barely a horse at all, and that is what makes it unforgettable. Some 110 metres long, it is drawn in a handful of flowing strokes: a long thin body, a beaked head with a single eye, and disconnected lines for legs, as if the animal were galloping out of the hill. It looks startlingly modern, yet optically stimulated luminescence dating after excavations in 1990 placed its making between about 1380 and 550 BC, in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. The figure was not simply scraped out of the turf: its makers dug deep trenches into the hillside and packed them with crushed white chalk, which is why the lines have survived.
Did you know? Luminescence dating has confirmed it as the oldest known chalk figure in Britain, roughly three thousand years old.
03 Cerne Abbas Giant
United Kingdom50.814° N 2.475° W
Tilman2007 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Cerne Abbas Giant is a naked man drawn in white lines on the steep grass of Giant Hill above the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. He is about 55 metres tall and brandishes a knotted club some 37 metres long over his head, and he is famously, emphatically male. The figure is not painted but engraved: its outlines are trenches cut into the turf, about 60 centimetres deep, packed with crushed chalk that shines against the green. From across the valley the giant has a startling liveliness, his features and body picked out in a few confident strokes that make him the most celebrated of England's hill figures.
Did you know? Surveys of the soil suggest the giant's famous phallus was added long after the rest of the figure, which may originally have been clothed.
04 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. The design is about 170–180 metres tall and 60 metres wide, and it is cut some 60 centimetres into the ground, and despite the strong winds of this coast it has never been erased. From the sea it can be seen from roughly 20 km away, while from the land above it is surprisingly hard to make out.
Did you know? The figure was made by scraping away the darker surface layer of the slope to expose the paler sand beneath, so it reads as a light drawing on dark ground.
05 Serpent Mound
United States39.026° N 83.430° W
Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis derivative work: MagentaGreen · Public domain On a wooded bluff above Ohio Brush Creek, a low ridge of earth winds for 1,348 feet (411 m) in the shape of a snake: a head at one end, open-jawed around an oval, a body thrown into a series of curves, and a tail wound into a tight triple coil. Serpent Mound is the largest known serpent effigy anywhere in the world. The earthwork is mostly yellowish clay and ash capped with rock and soil, from about 9 inches to more than 3 feet high and some 22 to 24 feet wide, and it follows the line of the ridge it sits on.
Did you know? Serpent Mound is considered the first privately funded archaeological preserve in the United States, thanks to Putnam's fundraising in the 1880s.
06 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. It is usually described as the largest prehistoric anthropomorphic geoglyph known anywhere, with published heights ranging from about 86 to 119 metres, and its drawing is disarmingly simple: a squarish head, a rectangular body, long stiff legs and short arms. What makes it unforgettable are the lines that spring from the head, four from the crown and four from each side, like a headdress of rays, all spread across a bare brown hillside with nothing else in sight but desert.
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.
07 Cœur de Voh
New Caledonia20.938° S 164.658° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay From the air, a clearing in a New Caledonian mangrove takes the unmistakable shape of a heart. The Cœur de Voh is a natural opening of about four hectares in the mangrove forest at the mouth of the Témala River, on the north-west coast of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia. What draws the outline is colour: the inside of the heart is colonised by pale grey mangrove, Avicennia marina, while the surrounding belt is made up of darker Rhizophora, so the figure stands out in two shades of green against the lagoon shore.
Did you know? Yann Arthus-Bertrand's photograph of the heart was first printed in 1992 in a little-known book of aerial views of New Caledonia, years before it became famous.
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
- How were the Nazca Lines made?
- The makers removed the reddish, iron-oxide-coated stones that cover the desert surface, exposing the lighter ground beneath. The dry, windless climate of the plateau has kept the lines visible for centuries.
- What is the most famous geoglyph in the world?
- On our list, Nazca Lines (Peru) ranks first, followed by Uffington White Horse (United Kingdom) and Cerne Abbas Giant (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most geoglyphs?
- In our collection, the most come from Peru (2), the United Kingdom (2) and Chile (1).
- Is the Cœur de Voh man-made?
- No. The Cœur de Voh in New Caledonia is a natural heart-shaped clearing within a mangrove forest, which became widely known through aerial photography.
- How many geoglyphs are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 geoglyphs in 5 countries. Peru has the most, with 2.