The lines are found on a desert plateau that stretches more than 80km near the foothills of the Andes. They were made by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 CE.
Most of the lines are on the flat desert ground.
But some are on the mountains.
And some are even half vertical so they could likely be seen from the ground.
The plateau is covered with a thin layer of dark reddish iron rich stones and sand. The big stones are grapefruit sized.
Underneath is fine, pale sand. The lines were formed by disturbing the top reddish layer to expose the pale layer underneath. Most of the lines are between 10cm and 15cm deep.
The desert is one of the driest on earth, which has preserved the lines for 1500 years. There is wind, which often forms these little dust devils, but that mostly seems to clean the light dust off of the heavier dark stones.
They also had a bunch of help in the last century from a mathematician named Maria Reiche. She wrote “the wind has obscured them by filling them with small dark pebbles from the surrounding surface like grain, making them difficult to detect from the air. To make them more accessible for viewing I cleaned them with a broom, one broom after another throughout the years. I went through so many brooms rumours circulated that I might be a witch!”
Some of the lines are 9km long, but the animal figures are much smaller. Some are only 4m across.
The lines can barely be seen from the ground. If you are right in front of one, it looks like a path.
But you don’t have to get very high up to see them. From about 6 feet in the air (11 feet including our height) you can tell they are there.
And by 16 feet in the air you can clearly make out the shape.
From the top of this viewing platform you can see two of them.
You can also see several of the geometric shapes from this natural hill, but there are no animal shaped ones nearby.
It takes about 5 minutes to climb.
And this is the view:
You can see most of them from the foothills, but it seems because some of the glyphs are on the mountains you don’t seem to be able to climb them anymore.
But they are best seen from the air.
So we took a flight in a small airplane over the desert.
The popular figures have names. The Nazca had no written language and we don’t know much about them, so they were named by people who saw them flying over. Many have multiple names because people can’t agree what they look like. This is the whale/orca (65m).
The owlman/astronaut (35m)
The monkey (93 m by 58 m)
The dog (53m)
The condor (134 m)
The spider (46m)
The hummingbird (93 m long)
The parrot (230m)
The hands/the frog (50m)
and the tree (70m).
A triangle. (There are many.)
There are also a lot of random ones that aren’t very popular so it’s hard to find names and sizes for them.
And random patches of lines and spirals and trapezoids, some of which have been wrecked by vehicles.
