Tagged “desert”
Chan Chan
How did the Chimú raise the largest earthen city on Earth — roughly 20 square kilometers of adobe palaces, tapering earthquake-resistant walls, and marine friezes — and keep tens of thousands of people alive in one of the driest deserts on the planet, where it almost never rains?
c. 850–1470 CE (Chimú kingdom of Chimor) · Chan Chan, near Trujillo, La Libertad Region, PeruAdded July 2026
HIGH WONDERNazca Lines
How did a people with no aircraft lay out animal figures and dead-straight lines running for kilometres across the desert — forms whose full shape is only legible from the air — with such control of scale and proportion, and what were they for?
c. 500 BCE – 500 CE (Nazca culture, with earlier Paracas-phase figures) · Nazca Desert (Pampa de Jumana), Ica Region, PeruAdded July 2026