Beyond the Nazca Lines: 2,000-year-old aqueducts intrigue tourists in Peru

Seen from above, the spirals formed in the middle of the Peruvian desert by the “water eyes” are frightening.

They are part of a pre-Columbian system of underground aqueducts, which, from the Andes, continue to irrigate three valleys in the region of the famous Nazca geoglyphs.

Built approximately 1,700 years ago near Nazca, 450 kilometers south of Lima, the aqueducts extend like branches forming a system of shafts and channels made of stones and beams of huarango, a Peruvian coastal tree.

The work is a marvel of hydraulic engineering initiated by the ancient Nazca culture’s inhabitants. Its preservation led Peruvian authorities to propose becoming a World Heritage Site to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“We now know that they were built around 100 to 200 AD, in the middle of the development of Nazca society,” said the director of the Nazca-Palpa Management Plan of the Ministry of Culture, Johny Isla.

This civilization developed on the southern coast of Peru and is attributed to the mysterious and famous Nazca lines, whose elaboration is later than that of the aqueducts.

“The two are contemporary and were made by the same society,” Isla explains.

UNIQUE IN SOUTH AMERICA

Of Nazca’s 42 aqueducts, 29 still carry water from snow-capped peaks and rivers to farmland where potatoes, cotton, vegetables, and fruit trees are grown.

The system carries about 18 to 20 liters of water per second.

Today, it benefits approximately 900 small farming families in the three valleys of Nazca, especially for their crops. They pay US$32 annually to a local entity.

“It helps us irrigate all the crops,” says 39-year-old farmer Nicolás Quispe, who maintains his potato crop with water from the Ocongalla aqueduct.

“It’s the only one in all of South America,” Isla points out as he walks along the Cantalloc aqueduct with an AFP team, protected by the geoglyph of a feline that seems to watch the course of the underground water from a neighboring hill.

The stones in the channels are made of rounded pebbles and are placed to filter the water in the wells up to 15 meters deep.

“Without this system, it would not have been possible for a civilization like the Nazca culture to exist,” assured archaeologist Abdul Yalli, emphasizing that the rivers in the region dry up almost all year round.

The wells are considered a great millennial public work.

“This is a work of art, of architecture and engineering.”

“They are stone channels that continue to function, and, of course, to be able to build them, millions of tons of sand had to be removed, the channel made, and covered up again,” pointed out Spaniard Jorge López-Doriga.

He is the Director of Communication for the AJE Group, the Peruvian multinational supporting local authorities in enhancing this hydraulic work.

The Nazca aqueducts are on Unesco’s indicative list to be declared Cultural Heritage of Humanity after being inscribed in 2019.

“There is nowhere else in the world this type of aqueduct, which is like a spiral,” said Ana María Cogorno, president of the International Association María Riche, which works to publicize the value of the Nazca lines.

A World Heritage Site since 1994, the Nazca lines are, according to Unesco, “the most outstanding group of geoglyphs in the world and are incomparable in extent, magnitude, quantity, size, and diversity to any other similar work.”

It is a series of geometric figures and giant animals made in the middle of the desert that can only be appreciated from the sky.

Its meaning is still an enigma: some researchers consider it an astronomical observatory, and others a calendar.

With information from AFP

News Peru, English news Peru, Nazca aqueducts

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