Hi Karen, I haven't visited the Nazca plains but am fascinated by them and hope to go see them myself someday. For those who aren't familiar, the Nazca lines are straight lines, geometric pictures and images of animals that are carved into the plains. What fascinates many people about these lines is that the patterns are so large that you can really only see the images from above. But these lines were made hundreds of years before airplanes and there aren't any mountains to climb up and look down. So why did the Nazca people make these huge images that can't be fully seen from the ground? No one really knows, but lots of people have theories. Some of the lines seem to be aligned the with sunrise/sunset on the days when water began running in the aqueducts of the plains. But it doesn't seem like there are enough lines that are aligned with the sun, moon and stars to be able to call them an observatory. -Nancy