The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites in South America
10 places in 6 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in South America are San Agustin archeological park (Colombia), Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and Cueva de las Manos (Argentina). The list covers 10 UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in 6 countries. Argentina has the most, with 2. Last updated 6 October 2026.
UNESCO recognition picks out the archaeological sites of South America that best explain how its peoples lived over thousands of years, and the range is wide. Painted caves record hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age's end, highland ceremonial centres show stone-working of great precision, a desert coast holds a city of mud brick, and the Jesuit missions of the Guaraní show a short-lived meeting of European baroque and Indigenous craft. Many of these sites were created without writing, so the stones and walls themselves carry the record.
Cueva de las Manos in the canyon of the Río Pinturas in Argentine Patagonia is covered with hundreds of stencilled hands and scenes of guanaco hunts. Pedra Furada, in Brazil's Serra da Capivara, is a sandstone arch above rock shelters painted with figures of people and animals. In the Andes, Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca shows finely fitted stonework and the carved Gateway of the Sun, and El Fuerte de Samaipata is a sandstone ridge carved with channels, seats and animal figures. On Peru's north coast, Chan Chan's walled compounds are decorated with adobe friezes of fish, birds and waves.
In southern Colombia, San Agustín is dotted with stone statues of guardians and deities, many with fangs, and Tierradentro holds underground tombs reached by spiral stairs and painted with red and black geometric designs. The missions of São Miguel das Missões in Brazil, San Ignacio Miní in Argentina and La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná in Paraguay preserve church ruins in red sandstone, with carving by Guaraní craftsmen.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | San Agustin archeological park | Archaeological site | Colombia | ✓ |
| 2 | Tiwanaku | Archaeological site | Bolivia | ✓ |
| 3 | Cueva de las Manos | Cave | Argentina | ✓ |
| 4 | Chan Chan | Archaeological site | Peru | ✓ |
| 5 | São Miguel das Missões | Ruins | Brazil | ✓ |
| 6 | San Ignacio Miní | Ruins | Argentina | ✓ |
| 7 | El Fuerte de Samaipata | Archaeological site | Bolivia | ✓ |
| 8 | Pedra Furada | Archaeological site | Brazil | ✓ |
| 9 | Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná | Ruins | Paraguay | ✓ |
| 10 | Tierradentro | Archaeological site | Colombia | ✓ |
01 San Agustin archeological park
Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín
Colombia1.884° N 76.296° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the green hills around the headwaters of the Magdalena River in southern Colombia, hundreds of stone figures stand guard over ancient tombs. San Agustín holds the largest group of religious monuments and megalithic sculpture in Latin America: more than 600 statues are known from the region, carved by a people whose name and language are unknown.
Did you know? The Fuente de Lavapatas is a network of channels cut into the rock of a stream bed, carved with human, amphibian and reptile figures.
02 Tiwanaku
Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Keyan Alejandro · CC BY 4.0 Tiwanaku, on the high plain south of Lake Titicaca, was the centre of one of the great civilisations of the Andes. The city grew in the first centuries AD, flourished from about 375 to 700, and at its peak covered some 4 square km with a population of well over 10,000. Tiwanaku imagery and trade spread across the southern Andes. Its society collapsed around 1000 AD, probably helped by a long drought.
Did you know? The builders locked stones together with I-shaped clamps of an unusual copper-arsenic-nickel bronze, some poured molten straight into the carved sockets.
03 Cueva de las Manos
Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mariano · Public domain Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape.
Did you know? Of the hands that can be identified, 829 are left hands and only 31 right, suggesting most painters held the spray pipe in their right hand.
04 Chan Chan
Peru · 6.2 km from Trujillo8.111° S 79.075° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 Chan Chan is a city made of earth. On the desert coast of northern Peru, in the Moche Valley, the capital of the Chimú kingdom spread across some 20 square kilometres, and it is regarded as the largest adobe-built city in the Americas.
Did you know? The Chimú believed the sun created three eggs: a gold one for rulers and nobles, a silver one for their wives, and a copper one for everyone else.
05 São Miguel das Missões
Brazil · 38.6 km from Santo Ângelo28.549° S 54.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vini Araujo Landscapher Photographer · CC BY-SA 4.0 A tall stone façade stands alone on a grassy plain in the far south of Brazil, its arched portal and single bell tower glowing reddish in the late sun. These are the remains of São Miguel Arcanjo, one of the Jesuit missions that once gathered thousands of Guarani people into planned towns across the borderlands of present-day Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Did you know? The Mbyá-Guarani call the ruins Tava Miri, the sacred stone village, and in 2015 Brazil registered the site as national heritage for that meaning.
06 San Ignacio Miní
Ruinas Jesuíticas de San Ignacio Mini
Argentina · 21.6 km from Hohenau27.255° S 55.532° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0 Thick walls of red sandstone standing among the trees of northeastern Argentina are what remain of San Ignacio Miní, one of the Jesuit mission towns founded among the Guaraní people in the seventeenth century.
Did you know? The ruins first joined UNESCO's list as an extension of São Miguel das Missões in Brazil, which had been inscribed a year earlier, in 1983.
07 El Fuerte de Samaipata
Bolivia · 5.2 km from Samaipata18.178° S 63.819° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Dpasten · CC BY-SA 4.0 El Fuerte de Samaipata is not a fortress at all but a single enormous sandstone ridge, about 220 metres long and 60 metres wide, whose back has been carved almost entirely into geometric and animal figures, niches and long canal-like grooves, one of which is known as the "spine of the serpent".
Did you know? The name Samaipata is usually translated from Quechua as "the heights of rest".
08 Pedra Furada
Brazil8.833° S 42.553° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thiagomarcelcampi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pedra Furada, "the pierced rock", takes its name from a stone arch in the hills of southeastern Piauí, but its fame comes from the great rock shelter beneath the cliffs of the Boqueirão da Pedra Furada. It is the best known of the hundreds of prehistoric sites inside Serra da Capivara National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.
Did you know? A series of 63 radiocarbon dates from the shelter built a sequence stretching from about 59,000 to 5,000 years ago.
09 Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná
Paraguay · 7.2 km from Hohenau27.132° S 55.702° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
P. Hughes · CC BY 4.0 The sandstone church at La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná is the largest temple ever raised in the Jesuit missions of South America, and its surviving walls still carry a carved frieze of angels caught in the act of making music, each holding an instrument.
Did you know? The musician angels of the church frieze play instruments such as the clavichord, pipe organ, trumpets, flute and Paraguayan harp.
More about Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná →
10 Tierradentro
Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro
Colombia2.583° N 76.033° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Anfecaro · CC0 Spiral stairways cut into the soft rock of a hilltop lead several metres down into dark chambers whose walls and ceilings are painted with red, black and white diamonds, zigzags and faces, so that standing inside feels like stepping into a painted house underground.
Did you know? The chambers of the largest hypogea can be 10 to 12 metres wide, some held up by two or three free-standing central columns with painted pilasters along the walls.
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 remarkable UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in South America?
- On our list, San Agustin archeological park (Colombia) ranks first, followed by Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and Cueva de las Manos (Argentina).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Argentina (2), Bolivia (2) and Brazil (2).
- What is El Fuerte de Samaipata?
- It is a large sandstone hill in Bolivia carved with channels, niches and animal figures, a ceremonial centre of pre-Inca peoples later used by the Incas. A town with Inca and later Spanish remains lies below it.
- How old are the paintings at Cueva de las Manos?
- The oldest hand stencils and hunting scenes at Cueva de las Manos are around 9,000 years old, and painting at the site continued for thousands of years after that.
- What is the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku?
- It is a doorway carved from a single block of andesite, topped by a frieze showing a central figure holding two staffs, flanked by rows of winged attendants. Its meaning is still debated.
- How many UNESCO-listed archaeological sites are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 10 UNESCO-listed archaeological sites in 6 countries. Argentina has the most, with 2.