Tourists trample protected prehistoric Peruvian mound carvings everywhere

Tourists have left footprints all over Peru’s Paracas Candelabra, a giant hillside carving that dates back about 2,500 years, according to officials who have launched a search for the culprits.

Over the weekend, police found footsteps zigzagging across the Paracas “geoglyph” — a large pattern carved into the ground resembling Peru’s more famous Nazca Lines, according to a culture ministry statement.

They found “two rows of steps going up from the bottom (of the carving), zigzagging, entering the right arm (of the candelabra), the left arm and the central part of the geoglyph”, allowing visitors to view only from Sea off, he added.

In addition to the tracks, which apparently belonged to three people, the officers also found vehicle tracks.

The captain of a tourist ship told a TV channel that he had spotted “a foreign couple with their young son and a shovel that damaged the candelabra” from the sea.

The station also broadcast footage taken with a cellphone from a nearby boat showing five people walking near the carved hilltop figure, the origins and meaning of which remain a subject of research.

The geoglyph is approximately 170 meters (557 feet) high, 60 meters wide and carved into the slope of a hill on the Paracas Peninsula south of Lima.

It was declared a national heritage site in 2016, and Peruvian law prescribes prison sentences of between three and six years for anyone who damages an archaeological monument.

The Paracas culture flourished on the southern coast of Peru from about 100 BC. to AD 200, but little was known about the people until archaeological excavations began in the 1920s.