Peru reduces Nazca Lines park by 42%, raising concerns over environmental and heritage risks
- Peru reduced the Nazca Lines archaeological park by about 42% on May 30, shrinking it from 5,600 to 3,200 square kilometers near Nazca.
- The Ministry of Culture enacted the reduction a day before acknowledging illegal mining inside the reserve, prompting concerns over regulatory motives.
- Critics, including environmental lawyer César Ipenza and former environment vice minister Mariano Castro, said the cut removes protections amid expanding extractive activities.
- Ipenza criticized the government's actions, saying they effectively facilitate illegal activities by presenting the changes as mere technical revisions, thereby weakening both environmental and cultural safeguards.
- The reduction risks serious harm by favoring informal mining, potentially violating Peru’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law and weakening decades of cultural and ecological safeguards.
32 Articles
32 Articles
In Peru, illegal miners can now obtain a permit to operate in the area around the famous Nazca Lines. The protection of that area has also been reduced. Environmentalists and archaeologists fear that valuable heritage will be lost and that the landscape will suffer serious environmental damage.
From the top of the provinces of Nazca and Palpa, in the Ica region, one of the most enigmatic archaeological territories in the world can be observed: the Nazca lines. Giant animals—a hummingbird, a parrot, a gull, two flames, among other geometric and human figures—drawn on some pampas that were declared by UNESCO as Historical and Cultural Heritage in 1994. Eight hundred geoglyphs up to 270 meters long, more than 2,000 years old, which consti…
Peru’s plan to drastically reduce Nazca Lines park size sparks concerns over environmental and heritage risks
Peru’s decision to shrink its archeological park home to the famous Nazca Lines by around 42% — an area roughly the size of 1,400 soccer fields — has sparked alarm among conservationists, archaeologists and environmental advocates.

Peru reduces Nazca Lines park by 42%, raising concerns over environmental and heritage risks
Peru’s decision to reduce the boundaries of the Nazca Archaeological Park by 1,000 hectares has sparked concern among conservationists and archaeologists.
The Minister of Culture, Fabricio Valencia, said that it is not the first time that an archaeological site has been redelimated, in reference to the modification of the perimetric plane of the Nasca Lines and Geoglyphs reserve, whose area has been reduced from 5633.47 square kilometers to 3235.93. At a press conference of the Council of Ministers he explained that they have studies and archaeological works that have been collected for more than …
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