Nazca spider
A spider about 46 metres long drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru, one of the animal figures of the Nazca lines.
Meaning
The spider is one of the large animal figures on the Pampa Colorada near Nazca. Britannica gives its length as about 46 metres (150 feet); Peru’s news agency Andina gives 42 metres. Britannica’s own caption calls it “what is considered to be the figure of a spider”: like the other figures, it is named by what it looks like from the air. A team writing in PNAS in 2024 lists spiders among the animals drawn on the pampa, and found that the large figures of this kind mostly show wild animals.
Origin and history
The large animal figures belong mostly to the Nazca culture, which Britannica dates to about 200 BC to AD 600; see the Nazca lines for how they were made and found.
A sign of rain?
In Andean animal symbolism, as the anthropologist Johan Reinhard reads it for National Geographic, spiders are believed to be a sign of rain. In a region that gets only about twenty minutes of rain a year, Reinhard argues, water mattered above all, and he thinks most of the lines led to places where rituals were held to obtain it.
Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsGateway of the Sun (the Staff God)A doorway cut from a single block of andesite at Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, carved above the opening with a god holding a staff in each hand. Who the figure is remains open: Britannica lists a sun god, a thunder god and Viracocha among the readings.
- The spider in folklore elsewhereSpider symbolismIn British and American folklore it is unlucky to kill a spider, and a small one on your clothes means money or a letter. In stories the spider is a weaver and a bringer: Arachne in Ovid, Spider Woman in Diné (Navajo) tradition, the Cherokee Water Spider who brought fire, and Anansi of the Gold Coast and Jamaica.
See also
Nazca monkey, Nazca lines, Nazca hummingbird, Tumi (ceremonial knife), Inti (the Inca sun), Inti Raymi (festival of the sun).
Sources
- Nazca Lines, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction; image caption
- 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
- Nasca lines, National Geographic, History and Culture, National Geographic, article text
- 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), Introduction
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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