The Nasca lines

Across fifty kilometres of Peruvian desert, the Nasca people scraped away the dark stones to expose pale ground beneath, drawing hummingbirds, a monkey, a spider and dead-straight lines running to the horizon, between roughly 500 BC and 500 AD, on a scale only fully legible from the air. They survive because it essentially never rains here. Theories run to water-cult processional paths and astronomical markers; the “alien runway” idea is nonsense. A real and staggering human achievement, best seen on a flight.