Things to do
6-
Líneas de Nazca
Hundreds of lines, trapezoids and animal figures scratched into the desert pavement between 500 BC and AD 500, best seen from a 30-minute light aircraft flight out of the Nazca airstrip. The flights go in the calm of the morning.
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Acueductos de Cantalloc
Spiral stone wells that step down to underground channels the Nazca cut around AD 500 to bring mountain water beneath the desert. Most of the forty-odd aqueducts still run and still water the fields around them.
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Cahuachi
The ceremonial capital of the Nazca culture, a set of adobe pyramids and plazas in the desert 25 kilometres west of town, from which the lines were almost certainly overseen. Much is unexcavated and there are few visitors.
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Cementerio de Chauchilla
An open desert necropolis 30 kilometres south of town where looters left mummies, hair and textiles in the sand; the tombs have since been re-set and roofed. The dry heat preserved bodies for a thousand years.
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Mirador de las Líneas
A metal tower beside the Pan-American Highway that gives a ground-level view of the Hands and the Tree, for anyone who would rather not fly. It is 20 kilometres north of town and the figures read best in low sun.
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Museo Antonini
The town's archaeological museum, run by the Italian mission that has dug Cahuachi for decades, with trophy heads, panpipes and textiles, and a stretch of restored Nazca aqueduct in the garden.