Nazca Lines
More than a thousand figures and straight lines scraped into the desert floor of southern Peru between roughly 500 BCE and 500 CE. An AI-assisted survey published in 2024 found 303 more that nobody had noticed.
Field Guide Entry
Scraped, not built
The lines are shallow. Whoever made them lifted the dark, iron-stained stones off the surface and exposed the pale ground underneath, which is why figures only a few inches deep have survived 2,000 years in one of the driest places on earth. Most are the work of the Nazca culture between about 500 BCE and 500 CE, with older Paracas figures underneath them.
Paul Kosok flew over in 1941 and began the modern study. Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, then spent close to 50 years measuring and mapping them, living beside the pampa and pushing for the protection that arrived with the UNESCO listing in 1994.
What they were for
The old answers keep failing. Reiche read the lines as an astronomical calendar, and statistical testing of the alignments has not supported her. Erich von Däniken's landing-strip idea does not survive contact with the ground itself, which is soft and would swallow an aircraft.
The 2024 survey sharpened the question by splitting the figures in two. The giant line-type geoglyphs mostly show wild animals and sit along the network of long lines and trapezoids, which points to use by groups. The small relief-type figures mostly show humans and domesticated llamas, and they sit within sight of winding footpaths, which points to something made to be seen by individuals walking past. Different figures, different audiences.
Doubling the count with a machine
In September 2024, a team from the Yamagata University Institute of Nasca, working with IBM Research, published in PNAS the results of a six-month field survey guided by an AI model trained on the geoglyphs already known. It identified 303 new figurative geoglyphs, close to doubling the confirmed total, and lifted the rate of discovery roughly sixteenfold. One of them is an orca holding a knife.
The threats to all of it are mundane. A truck driver crossed the pampa in 2018 and left ruts through three lines. Greenpeace activists walked onto the Hummingbird in 2014 to lay out a banner and left footprints that cannot be lifted. The Panamericana Sur was cut straight through the Lizard decades ago, and its tail is on the far side of the highway.
Visiting Information
There are two ways to see the lines and they are not equivalent. Overflights leave from the María Reiche Neuman aerodrome outside Nazca town, run 30 to 35 minutes over the figures, and cost around $85 for the seat in 2026, with an airport tax and a Nazca Lines ticket payable separately in cash on the day, which brings the real total closer to $105. Morning slots before 11am get calmer air and fewer cancellations, and booking 2 to 3 days ahead is worth doing between May and September, when the morning departures fill first.
The roadside mirador on the Panamericana Sur costs a few soles and gives an angled view of the Hands, the Tree, and part of the Lizard from a metal platform. It shows a fraction of what the flight does, from ground level. The aircraft are small and the air over the pampa is turbulent, so anyone prone to motion sickness tends to regret a large breakfast.
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