Tourists have left footprints all over Peru’s Paracas Candelabra, an enormous hillside carving that dates from some 2,500 years ago, according to officials who have launched a search for the culprits.
Over the weekend, police found footsteps zigzagging over the Paracas “geoglyph,” a large design carved into the ground similar to Peru’s better-known Nazca lines, according to a Culture Ministry statement.
They found “two rows of footsteps that go from the bottom (of the carving) to the top, zigzagging, entering the right arm [of the candelabra], the left arm, and central part of the geoglyph,” which visitors are allowed to view only from the sea, it added.
The captain of a tourist ship told a television station he had spotted, from the sea, “a foreign couple with their young son and a shovel damaging the candelabra.”
The station also broadcast footage recorded on a mobile phone from a nearby boat showing five people walking near the carved hillside figure, whose origins and meaning remain the subject of research.
