The mysterious Nazca lines are located in the department of Ica-Peru. Nazca is world-wide famous by being the cradle of the Nazca culture whose maximum apogee took place between centuries II b.c. and IV a.c. This culture stood out for its ceramics of symbolic and streamlined figures where color dominates to the drawing.

The lines extend in a perimeter of 50 kilometers in length and 15 kilometers wide and are composed by a set of zoomorfas, fitomorfas, anthropomorphous and geometric figures that appear engraved in the surface of the desert.

The ground of the region, one of driest and desert of the world, has a brown color and under this layer hides another one of yellow color. We must have present that the dryness of the zone favors the conservation of the drawings.

The depth of the lines never exceeds 30 cm and some are simple scratches in the surface, but even so they can be recognized when the sun is low and the relief is accentuated.

Maria Reiche, the German mathematician, was the most persistent investigator of these enormous drawings. For more than a half century she investigated the Nazca figures and far from the hypothesis on extraterrestrial civilizations, the investigator affirmed that the lines had a great astronomical meaning and forms a gigantic calendar according the movements of sun, moon and constellations.

The amazing thing is that these lines can only be observed in all its immensity from the air, over flying the desert. The lines are also an old testimony of a great geometric Peruvian´s knowledge, technically these lines are perfect and the drawings are well proportionate, mainly if we thought about the dimensions of the drawings.

Figures

There are numerous figures in Nazca, particularly in Pampas of San Jose: geometric figures, representations of animals, humans and vegetables, labyrinths and other geometric drawings. Between the most representatives are:

Birds between 25 and 275 meters in length like: giant hummingbird, condors, heron, crane, pelican, gull, parrot and others
A monkey,
A spider,
A snail,
A small lizard,
A whale, etc., etc.
Reptiles, a lizard, iguana and a serpent.
Anthropomorphous figure that some identify with an astronaut.

Almost all the drawings were done in the surface; only there are a few in slopes of hills. There are more than thirty geoglifos found until today in the Pampa of Nazca. The drawings are smaller in amount compared with the geometric designs that consist of hundreds and hundreds of lines, triangles and quadrangles that occupy great land extensions.