14.8186°S, 75.1167°W.
Cahuachi is a vast Nazca-culture ceremonial complex in the desert south of the Río Grande de Nazca in southern Peru, built between approximately 100 BCE and 500 CE during the Early Intermediate Period. The site covers 24 square kilometres and contains more than forty pyramidal mounds of adobe and stone, the largest reaching 30 metres in height. Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Orefici, excavating since 1982, has demonstrated that Cahuachi was not a residential city but a pilgrimage centre — visited periodically by the dispersed Nazca population for ritual ceremonies, then left empty between events. The site preserves the largest concentration of Nazca polychrome ceramics, textiles, and ritual offerings ever recovered. Cahuachi sits on the southern edge of the same desert plateau that bears the famous Nazca Lines, drawn by the same culture in the same centuries.
Cahuachi is a city the size of a small town that nobody actually lived in — its builders walked back across the desert to it for ceremonies, then walked away again.