Nazca Lines — geoglyph
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay

Nazca Lines

Líneas de Nazca

  • 1 min read
  • 14.697° S 75.135° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • 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.
  • Laid end to end, the lines would run more than 1,300 km, spread across about 50 square kilometres of desert.
  • The hummingbird figure is 93 metres long, the monkey 93 by 58 metres, and the condor 134 metres.
  • More than 70 of the figures depict animals, including a spider, fish, heron, lizard, dog and cat, alongside a human figure.
  • The geoglyphs were made between about 500 BC and AD 500, the earliest by the Paracas culture before the Nazca.
  • They have survived for so long because the plateau is isolated and its climate is dry, windless and remarkably stable.
  • Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe first noticed the lines in 1927 while hiking through the surrounding foothills.
  • A previously unknown geoglyph in the shape of a cat was discovered on a hillside in 2020.
  • In 2024 researchers using artificial intelligence identified 303 previously unknown geoglyphs around Nazca.
  • The lines and geoglyphs were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

Why it is worth it

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.

The problem, as archaeoastronomers Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded after a rigorous statistical review in 1990, is that there are so many lines running in so many different directions across the desert that some of them are going to line up with an astronomically significant point on the horizon purely by chance — with enough lines pointed in enough directions, you can always find an alignment if you look for one.

A newer line of research points somewhere else entirely: underground, not upward. Researchers have found that many geoglyphs sit near wells and geological fault lines, suggesting the lines may have marked the location of scarce water sources in one of the driest deserts on Earth — a hypothesis that would make the Nazca Lines less an astronomical instrument and more a practical map of where to dig, drawn at a scale only visible from above.

Getting there

26 km from Nazca. Maria Reiche Neuman Airport (NZC) is about 26 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Peru 28The Most Mystical Places in Peru 5The Most Remarkable Geoglyphs 7The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Peru 14The Greatest Ancient Archaeological Wonders 52The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Remarkable Ancient Places 78The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Nazca lines are a group of geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed. There are two major phases of the Nazca lines, Paracas phase, from 400 to 200 BC, and Nazca phase, from 200 BC to 500 AD. In the 21st century, several hundred new figures have been found with the use of drones, and archaeologists believe that there are more to be found.

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