Nazca lines
Giant drawings scraped into the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BC and AD 500: straight lines and trapezoids several kilometres long, and outlines of animals and plants. UNESCO lists them as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa.
Meaning
The Nazca (or Nasca) lines cover about 450 square kilometres of the Pampa Colorada, northwest of the town of Nazca and some 400 km south of Lima. They were made, UNESCO explains, by clearing away the dark weathered gravel on the surface to show the lighter ground beneath. UNESCO’s description counts living creatures, stylised plants, imaginary beings and geometric figures several kilometres long among them. Britannica attributes most of them to the Nazca culture, which it dates to about 200 BC to AD 600, and some older ones to the Paracas culture before it. Peru’s Ministry of Culture manages and protects them, and UNESCO added them to the World Heritage List in 1994. The best known figures have pages of their own: the hummingbird, the monkey and the spider.
Origin and history
The lines were studied on the ground before most people saw them from the air. National Geographic names the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe as the first to study them systematically, in 1926; Peru’s state news agency, Andina, dates his first reports to 1927. The American historian Paul Kosok flew over them in 1941, Britannica says, and thought they had been drawn for astronomical purposes. María Reiche, a German translator, studied them for some forty years and campaigned for their protection; she concluded that the site was a huge astronomical calendar and that some of the animals were modelled on groups of stars. In 1967 the astrophysicist Gerald Hawkins found no correlation between the movements of the heavens and the design of the lines.
The count of figures keeps growing. A team writing in PNAS in 2024 says it took nearly a century to find 430 figurative geoglyphs, and reports 303 more found in six months of fieldwork guided by an AI model, nearly doubling the total.
Two kinds of figure
The PNAS team divides the drawn figures into two kinds. The line-type figures are the giants, on average 90 metres long, and 64 per cent of them show wild animals; pottery of the Early Nasca period (AD 50 to 300) has been found at two of them, the whale and the monkey. The relief-type figures are small, on average 9 metres, and 81.6 per cent show people or things people have changed: humans, severed heads and domesticated camelids. The line-type figures lie near the network of straight lines and trapezoids, and the team concludes they were probably built and used by the community for ritual.
What were the Nazca lines for?
Nobody knows for certain. UNESCO’s description says they are believed to have had ritual astronomical functions, the reading Kosok and Reiche argued for. Later fieldwork points to water and to walking. The Nasca-Palpa Project, formed in 1997, found platforms at one end of many figures and fragments of thorny oyster shell (Spondylus) in one of them, which Britannica reports as evidence of processions and of religious ceremonies for water. The anthropologist Johan Reinhard, quoted by National Geographic, thinks most of the lines led to places where rituals were performed “to obtain water and fertility of crops”. The PNAS team reads the network as a route for pilgrimages from the Ingenio valley to the Cahuachi temple and the meeting of two rivers in the Nazca valley, and notes that the claim that the animals are constellations has been criticised as a Western view of the sky. National Geographic sets the ancient-astronaut theories of the 1960s beside the astronomical ones as ideas that later research picked apart.
Other figures on the pampa
Britannica lists a killer whale of 65 metres, a bird resembling a condor of 135 metres and a pelican of 285 metres. Andina’s list of the largest gives a bird of nearly 300 metres, a lizard of 180 metres, and a pelican and a condor of 135 metres each. The two disagree on the monkey too: about 110 metres in Britannica, 135 in Andina.
Damage
UNESCO notes that the Pan-American Highway runs straight across the site and has damaged some lines and figures. In 2014 Greenpeace activists laid a banner beside the hummingbird, and a court in Ica later gave one of them a suspended sentence for the damage.
Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca hummingbirdOne of the best known Nazca lines: a bird drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru with a long straight bill, spread wings and a long pointed tail. A 2019 study identified it as a hermit, a kind of hummingbird of Peru’s northern and eastern forests.
- The same shape in Celtic symbolsIrish harp (Celtic harp)The harp is the emblem of the Irish state: it is on Irish coins, the President’s flag and seal, and the papers of every government department. The state’s harp is modelled on the oldest surviving Irish harp, a medieval instrument at Trinity College Dublin known as the Brian Boru harp.
See also
Nazca monkey, Nazca spider, Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God), Tumi (ceremonial knife), Inti (the Inca sun), Inti Raymi (festival of the sun).
Sources
- Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa, UNESCO World Heritage List, property 700 (inscribed 1994; Internet Archive copy), UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Brief synthesis; Authenticity; Protection and management
- Nazca Lines, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction; interpretations; Nasca-Palpa Project
- AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose, by Masato Sakai and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (2024), e2407652121, doi:10.1073/pnas.2407652121, PNAS (PubMed Central full text), Abstract; Introduction; Discussion
- Nasca lines, National Geographic, History and Culture, National Geographic, article text
- Líneas de Nasca: misterio e historia que deslumbran al mundo, Agencia Andina (Peru’s state news agency), November 2016, Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina, article text
- Peru: Greenpeace activist given suspended prison sentence for damaging Nazca Lines, Agencia Andina, May 2017, Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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