Håkan Svensson · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Chan Chan

added29 August 2026

The largest adobe city in the world: twenty square kilometres of mudbrick walls, capital of the Chimú kingdom until the Inca took it around 1470. The walls carry reliefs of sea creatures and waves. In 2018 a burial was found here containing the remains of more than a hundred and forty children and two hundred llamas — the largest known child sacrifice in history, made, judging by the silt layers, during a flood.

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-8.10583, -79.07444

Huanchaco Open in maps

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UFO sightingGreen

Marcahuasi and the Plateau of Stone Faces

A plateau at four thousand metres in the Peruvian Andes, strewn with weathered rocks in which faces and animal figures appear under the right light. The Peruvian researcher Daniel Ruzo announced in the 1950s that they were the work of an ancient civilisation; geologists hold the shapes to be erosion and the resemblance to be the work of human eyesight. From the 1970s the plateau became a place for esoteric groups to camp, and reports of lights arrived with them. They have been described here for decades, and Marcahuasi is a fixture on Peruvian lists of sighting sites. It can only be reached on foot or on horseback, the nights are cold, and most of the observations were made by people who came for them.

493 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Ica Stones

From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.

795 km away

OtherGreen

Nazca Lines

Giant geoglyphs etched into the desert of southern Peru more than 1,500 years ago. The animal figures and geometric patterns are only fully legible from the air — their purpose is still unresolved.

854 km away

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