Tourists trample all over protected, prehistoric Peruvian hill carving

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.