The Pan-American Highway runs along Peru's southern coast through some of the most arid and singular landscapes on the planet.
Peru is best known for Machu Picchu, Andean landscapes and the treasures of the Inca civilisation. But is that all? South of Lima, the Pan-American Highway reveals an altogether different side of the country. Let's set off along it for an open-air lesson in history, geology and biology.
Archaeological sites bear witness to the power of the Inca civilisation. At Tambo Colorado, 270 km from Lima, the sun was once worshipped on a plaza framed by adobe buildings, once painted red and now forgotten by all but the wind and dust. The Paracas Peninsula once belonged to a people who reached their golden age well before the Incas. Today the peninsula presents one of the most desolate landscapes imaginable: a lunar desert scorched white by the sun, shifting from ochre yellow to blazing red, home since 1975 to a national reserve of extraordinary richness. A boat trip to the Ballestas Islands gives a sense of the abundance of food beneath the ocean's surface. Hundreds of thousands of boobies of various species, pelicans and Guanay cormorants have colonised this archipelago.
70 kilometres further on, the Ica region stands in stark contrast to the surrounding desert. Orchards spring up on all sides in a burst of greenery. Here mangoes, avocados, maize, cotton, potatoes and pecans are grown. And grapes. Wine estates are home to bodegas where you can sample the famous pisco, a grape spirit drunk throughout Peru, as well as red and white wines.
Around a hundred kilometres further south, the road crosses the vast desert plain where, for over a thousand years, people drew straight lines and geometric, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures several kilometres long. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, the Nazca Lines are among the most enigmatic achievements in human history.
