Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines are a collection of enormous geoglyphs etched into the surface of the Nazca Desert plateau in southern Peru, created by removing the reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles of the desert surface to reveal the pale yellow-grey ground beneath — a technique preserved for two millennia by the extreme aridity and near-total absence of wind erosion in one of the driest places on Earth. The figures include over 800 perfectly straight lines (some stretching 50 kilometres without deviation), 300 geometric figures including trapezoids, spirals, and rectangles, and more than 70 biomorphic designs of animals and plants — among them a 300-metre pelican, a 190-metre monkey with a spiralling tail, a spider, a hummingbird, and a condor with a wingspan exceeding 130 metres. The lines were created by the Nazca culture over a period of roughly 900 years and are only fully visible from the air — a fact that led Swiss author Erich von Däniken to controversially claim they were built by or for extraterrestrials, a theory rejected by all serious archaeologists. The most widely accepted scholarly interpretation is that the lines were used for ritual processions connected to water, fertility, and astronomical observation in a region where rainfall is catastrophically unpredictable.