Hola from the Nazca Lines in Peru,
You may be forgiven for thinking that building a road through something extraordinary like the Nazca Lines was reprehensible. From above, it looks like a terrible mistake, a bit like the tarred road built through Pamukkale in southern Turkey. This is a different case altogether. There is no egregious dereliction of duty here.
The Nazca Lines are all but invisible from ground level. In the 1930s, international pilots overflying these arid plains in southern Peru reported seeing strange man-made lines on the ground. These are now known as the Nazca Lines, an extraordinary collection of prehistoric messages on the rocky plains, devoid of vegetation. The road had already traversed the terrain, cutting in half the crocodile and several other designs in the process, joining the irrigated valleys of Palpa and Nazca.
The two big questions every visitor has is how and why. These are not trifling excavations, done by a bored individual. These patterns in the rocky ground are several kilometres long. The longest line is 9 kilometres long. These were not put there by some fraudster, trying to take the piss, like the crop circles in Britain and Marree Man in Australia. These were created more than two thousand years ago, and they are still eminently visible from the air.
The best guess as to how these designs were achieved is that the artists started with a small design, enclosing it within a rectangle, dividing the rectangle into squares, and then to place stones on the ground as part of an enlargement, then digging a trench where the stones had been placed. This theory is entirely plausible, but still the act itself was difficult to imagine.
The bigger question – and the one most likely to beget a variety of theories – is why.
The fact is that for two thousand years, the messages were not seen by humans, at least here on Earth. The road bisects the crocodile and the wide ditch seen in this photograph. On the ground, there is no hint that such a design is actually there. The road builders can be excused.
Adios from Nazca
Gregorio