Nazca

From the ground the Nazca plain is a flat ochre nothing. From a few hundred metres up it is covered in drawings: straight lines kilometres long, spirals, a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider, scraped into the desert crust by the people who lived here two thousand years ago. Our Nazca snapback is cut from a warm desert stripe, the sun family, Inti, the colours of that plain in the last hour of light.

The lines

The Nazca lines cover about 450 square kilometres of pampa between the towns of Nazca and Palpa. They were made by lifting the dark, oxidised stones off the surface to expose the pale ground beneath, and because it almost never rains here they have stayed for two millennia. There are hundreds of figures and thousands of lines. What they were for is still argued: water, ritual, astronomy, procession. The best view is from a small plane, the second best from the tower on the highway.

The people who drew them

The Nazca culture that made the lines also made some of the finest pottery and cloth on the coast, in the same centuries as Paracas just up the shore. Their textiles use the same warm palette as their pots: ochre, red, cream, black. Cahuachi, their ceremonial centre of adobe pyramids, sits at the edge of the plain. Cerro Blanco, one of the highest dunes in the world, stands over the town.

The cap named Nazca

The Nazca is a flat-brim snapback in a full handwoven desert-stripe aguayo with gold chakana embroidery, one of three snapbacks we make and the warmest. Its sun-family neighbours are the Oruro ball cap and the Arequipa bag.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · Tacna · La Paz · El Alto · Copacabana · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear and bags, and the cloth families on the weaves.