The Nazca Lines: Who Made Them, Their Size and Their Purpose

Short answer: The Nazca Lines are more than 1,300 km (800 mi) of lines, shapes and animal figures scraped into the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BC and AD 500 by the Paracas and Nasca cultures. They cover about 50 km² (19 sq mi) about 450 km (280 mi) south of Lima, and the largest figures reach about 370 m (1,200 ft).

Nazca Lines quick facts

Item	Detail	Source
Made by	Paracas culture (about 400 to 200 BC) and Nasca culture (about 200 BC to AD 500)	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
Where	Pampa between Nazca and Palpa, Ica region, about 450 km (280 mi) south of Lima	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
Area of the lines	About 50 km² (19 sq mi)	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
Total length of lines	More than 1,300 km (800 mi)	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
Animal and plant figures	More than 70 large figures, plus hundreds of lines and shapes	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
Figurative geoglyphs known	733 after the AI survey announced in September 2024	Andina, September 24, 2024
UNESCO	Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa, inscribed 1994, about 75,358 ha	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines (UNESCO site blocks crawlers)
Depth and width	10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) deep, about 30 cm to 1.8 m (1 to 6 ft) wide	Wikipedia, Nazca Lines
How to see them	Small plane, about 30 minutes from the Nazca airfield	Agency itinerary, checked October 2026

Stand on the pampa at seven in the morning and you will not see a single figure. You see a flat brown plain of small dark stones, a pale stripe running off toward the hills, and the Panamericana humming past. That is the first thing the Nazca Lines teach you: they were made by people standing exactly where you stand, and they were never meant to be read from a plane. This page is about what they are, who made them, how big they are, and what the people who study them actually agree on.

What are the Nazca Lines?

The Nazca Lines are geoglyphs, drawings made on the surface of the ground, on the desert plateau between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in the Ica region of Peru. UNESCO inscribed them in 1994 as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa. The spelling Nasca is the one archaeologists use for the culture. Nazca is the usual spelling for the town and the lines.

There are three kinds of drawing, and most visitors only hear about the third. Straight lines, some running for kilometers across the pampa, make up most of the total length. Geometric shapes, such as long trapezoids, triangles and spirals, cover the largest surface. The animal and plant figures, more than 70 of them, are the famous part: the hummingbird, the monkey, the spider, the condor, the whale, the tree and the hands. A separate group of smaller figures cut into hillsides, many of them older, sits closer to Palpa.

Who made the Nazca Lines?

The Nazca Lines were made by two cultures of the south coast of Peru, the Paracas and the Nasca, over roughly a thousand years. The Paracas phase runs from about 400 to 200 BC and the Nasca phase from about 200 BC to AD 500, according to the dates summarized on Wikipedia from the archaeological literature. The Paracas people made the earlier hillside figures around Palpa. The Nasca made most of the lines and figures on the open pampa.

The Nasca were farmers in one of the driest valleys on the planet. They built underground aqueducts, the puquios, to reach groundwater, and they made fine polychrome pottery and textiles. The same animals that appear on the pampa, monkeys, birds, killer whales, appear painted on their pots, which is one of the ways archaeologists tie the figures to the culture. Their ceremonial center was Cahuachi, a complex of adobe mounds on the Nazca River, and some researchers link groups of lines to it.

How do we know the dates? Wooden stakes found at the ends of some lines were carbon dated, and pottery fragments left along the lines match known Nasca styles. The German archaeologist Markus Reindel and the Peruvian archaeologist Johny Cuadrado Isla dated many of the Palpa motifs to between 600 and 200 BC, which pushes the oldest figures back before the Nasca culture took shape.

How were the Nazca Lines made?

The Nazca Lines were made by removing stones, not by digging. The desert floor is covered with reddish brown pebbles darkened by iron oxide. Underneath is a pale, lime rich ground. Lift the dark stones off a strip and pile them along the edges, and a light line appears. Most lines are only 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) deep, and their width runs from about 30 cm (1 ft) to 1.8 m (6 ft).

The large figures were laid out with simple surveying: wooden stakes, cord and a small drawing scaled up by measured steps. The American investigator Joe Nickell and a small team later reproduced a large Nazca figure with stakes, cord and simple tools in a matter of days, and it read correctly from the air. Nobody needed to fly to make them.

They survived because of the place. The pampa gets almost no rain, the wind near the ground is weak, and a morning mist hardens the surface layer. A footprint made on the pampa today stays for centuries, which is the same reason the lines lasted two thousand years and the reason damage to them is permanent.

How big are the Nazca Lines?

The Nazca Lines cover about 50 km² (19 sq mi) of pampa, the lines add up to more than 1,300 km (800 mi), and the largest single figures reach about 370 m (1,200 ft), roughly four American football fields laid end to end. The protected UNESCO area is much larger, about 75,358 hectares (186,200 acres), because it includes the Palpa figures and the land around them.

Size of the famous Nazca figures

Figure	Length (m)	Length (ft)	For scale
Spider	47	154	About half a football field
Hummingbird	93	305	A football field, goal line to goal line
Monkey	93 by 58	305 by 190	A football field, end zones excluded
Condor	134	440	About one and a half football fields
Cat (found 2020, Paracas)	37	120	A blue whale is about 30 m (98 ft)
New figures from the 2024 AI survey	9 on average	30 on average	A school bus is about 12 m (40 ft)
Largest figures	About 370	About 1,200	Four football fields end to end

The sizes explain the most common question we hear: why you cannot see them properly from the ground. A figure the length of a football field drawn with a line one foot wide is invisible from eye level. From the 18 m (59 ft) viewing tower on the highway you see two or three figures at an angle. From a small plane at a few hundred meters, the hummingbird snaps into focus.

Who was Maria Reiche?

Maria Reiche was a German mathematician who spent most of her life measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines. Born in Dresden on May 15, 1903, she came to Peru in 1932 as a tutor for the children of the German consul in Cusco, started working with the American historian Paul Kosok in 1940 and first saw the lines from the air in 1941. Kosok had flown over them in 1940 and 1941 and is credited as the first scholar to study them in depth, after the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe noticed them on foot in 1927.

Reiche argued that the lines formed an astronomical calendar, and she published her work in The Mystery on the Desert in 1949. Her lasting contribution is not the theory. It is the protection. She persuaded the Peruvian Air Force to fly survey photographs, paid for guards with the money from her books, fought officials after a road cut through a figure, and sponsored the viewing tower so visitors would stop walking on the pampa. She died in Lima on June 8, 1998, and is buried near Nazca. Her house became the Museo Maria Reiche, and the Nazca airfield carries her name.

Why were the Nazca Lines made?

Nobody knows for certain why the Nazca Lines were made, but most archaeologists now read them as ritual spaces tied to water and to walking, not as a calendar and certainly not as a runway. The figures were made to be used on the ground. Many are drawn as a single continuous line that you can walk from start to finish without crossing, which fits a procession better than a picture.

Why the Nazca Lines were made: the theories and what archaeology accepts

Theory	Who proposed it	What the evidence says
Astronomical calendar	Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche, 1940s	Tested by Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni, who found too few alignments to support it as the main purpose
Water and mountain worship	Johan Reinhard, 1985	Widely accepted as part of the answer. Lines point to water sources and mountains in a desert that depends on them
Lines following underground water	David Johnson	Debated. Some lines match aquifers and puquios, others do not
Paths for ritual walking	Several researchers, supported by the 2024 PNAS study	Strong current view. Figures are single continuous lines and small figures sit beside old trails
Giant looms for textiles	Henri Stierlin, 1983	Not accepted by archaeologists
Landing strips for aliens	Erich von Däniken, 1968	Rejected. The lines are shallow, the ground is soft, and small teams with stakes and cord can lay out the figures in days

Our opinion, after years of taking travelers there: the water explanation is the one that makes sense when you stand in Nazca. The river runs dry for months, the Nasca dug aqueducts to survive, and the lines point toward the mountains where the rain comes from. Any pilot or guide who gives you the answer as settled fact is guessing.

What did AI and drones find in 2024?

In September 2024 a team from Yamagata University in Japan and IBM Research announced 303 new figurative geoglyphs on the Nazca pampa, nearly doubling the known total. Masato Sakai, who leads the Yamagata project, said the new figures add to the 430 found earlier, for 733 in total, according to the Peruvian state news agency Andina. The study was published in the journal PNAS under the title "AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose."

The method matters more than the number. The team fed satellite images, aerial photographs and drone imagery of about 400 km² (155 sq mi) into an AI model, which proposed candidates, and archaeologists then walked out to check them during six months of fieldwork. The new figures are small, about 9 m (30 ft) on average, and mostly of the relief type: humans, domesticated llamas and alpacas, and scenes cut on slopes close to the old footpaths. The large line figures of wild animals, the hummingbird and the monkey, sit on the network of lines and trapezoids. The study reads the small ones as images seen by individuals or small groups walking a trail, and the big ones as places for community ritual.

Two earlier finds belong to the same story. In 2018 drones revealed about 25 geoglyphs in Palpa attributed to the Paracas culture. In October 2020 Peru's Ministry of Culture announced a cat about 37 m (120 ft) long on a steep hillside, dated to the late Paracas period and found during maintenance work on a viewpoint. Only about 30 percent of the area has been surveyed this way, so expect more.

Are the Nazca Lines protected?

Yes. The Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a protected archaeological zone in Peru, and walking onto the pampa without authorization is a crime. They are still fragile, and the damage of the last decades came from people, not weather.

The Greenpeace case, December 2014

On December 8, 2014, during the United Nations climate conference in Lima, Greenpeace activists walked onto the pampa and laid out a banner of large cloth letters next to the hummingbird. Peru's deputy culture minister, Luis Jaime Castillo, said the footprints they left would last hundreds or thousands of years, and prosecutors opened a case for attacking archaeological monuments, a crime punishable by up to six years in prison, as reported by the Associated Press. Greenpeace apologized publicly. A drone photo published afterward showed the trail of footprints near the figure.

The truck, January 2018

In late January 2018 a truck driver left the Panamericana and drove across the protected area, leaving deep tire marks over about 50 by 100 m (165 by 330 ft) and damaging three geoglyphs, according to Peru's Ministry of Culture as reported by CNN. A judge released the driver for lack of evidence that he acted on purpose.

The reserve boundary, 2025

On May 30, 2025 the Ministry of Culture cut the archaeological reserve from about 5,600 km² to about 3,200 km² (2,160 to 1,240 sq mi). Critics said the cut excluded areas with mining claims. On June 8, 2025 the ministry annulled the resolution and restored the original boundary, as reported by the AP. The highway itself is an older scar: it was built through the pampa before the lines were protected and cuts the lizard figure in half.

How can you see the Nazca Lines?

You can see the Nazca Lines in three ways: from a small plane, from the viewing tower on the highway, or in the Museo Maria Reiche. Only the plane shows the figures whole. The overflight from the Nazca airfield lasts about 30 minutes, and every figure gets a hard bank to the left and to the right. Our Nazca Lines flight guide covers the two airports, motion sickness and the accident record in detail, and you should read it before you book any flight.

The tower stands beside the Panamericana north of town and shows the tree, the hands and part of the lizard. It costs little, takes ten minutes and is the right choice if a small plane is not for you. The museum, in Reiche's former house at San Pablo outside Nazca, has her notes, tools and room as she left them.

Where are the Nazca Lines, and how do you get there?

The Nazca Lines are on the south coast of Peru, about 450 km (280 mi) from Lima, roughly 7 hours by road on the Panamericana. That distance is why Nazca takes two days from the capital. Most travelers combine it with the Paracas sea lions and the Huacachina dunes on the way south.

Our Nazca Lines, Paracas and Huacachina 2-day tour from Lima, from US$307 per person, flies from the Nazca airfield on the second morning. If you want Nazca inside a full Peru trip, Peru in 7 Days: Lima, Nazca, Cusco and Machu Picchu, from US$900, puts the coast first while you are still at sea level and then flies you to Cusco. The day trips from Lima page compares the coast tours.

What our agency handles, and the limits

We are a travel agency based in Cusco. We organize the coast tours above, with the flight booked through a licensed operator as part of the package. We do not sell the Nazca flight on its own, we do not run the planes, and we do not take anyone onto the pampa, which is closed to visitors. If a seller offers you a walk among the figures, say no.

Updated October 2026.