The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs
of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly
love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an
enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.
The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BCE and 100BCE, emerged
during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a
natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.
A Unesco world heritage site since 1994, the Nazca Lines, which are
made up of hundreds of geometric and zoomorphic images, were created by
removing rocks and earth to reveal the contrasting materials below. They
lie 250 miles (400km) south of Lima and cover about 450 sq km (175 sq
miles) of Peru’s arid coastal plain. ...