The Lines are undoubtedly one of the world’s biggest archaeological mysteries and bring many thousands of visitors every year to Peru’s South Coast. The greatest expert on and student of these mammoth desert designs was Maria Reiche, who escaped from Nazi Germany to Peru in the 1930s and worked at Nazca almost continuously from 1946 until her death in 1998.

One of the great mysteries of South America, the Nazca Lines are a series of animal figures and geometric shapes, none of them repeated and some up to 200m in length, drawn across some five hundred square kilometers of the bleak, stony Pampa de San Jose or, more simply, the Nazca plain.