These big, crazy drawing are carved into the desert high plains of Peru’s pampas. You’ve got monkeys, fish, llamas and some very stylised spiders and lizards, and there are hundreds of them: huge, flat line drawings dancing across the desert. We know about when they were done, somewhere between 200 and 700 BC, but we don’t really know why or how (but it was probably just simple, well planned surveying rather than extra terrestrial intervention.).

The lines aren’t even really carved in deep, the Nazcas pretty much just swept aside the top, oxidised layer of gravel and underneath the ground is light and sandy and its so dry and still here they still haven‘t been covered over. Yes the best view is from a plane but you can see them pretty well from the top of the hills on the edge of the desert, this makes lots of people think they were drawn specially for the gods… Its just so fantastic that these ancient people came up with something so immensely vast and creative, thousands of people must have helped make them and it would have taken several lifetimes.

My personal highlight are the monkeys which I suspect Quentin Blake ripped off!

Written by  LK Barromet.

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