A small sightseeing plane carrying 11 tourists and two crew members crashed and caught fire near the famous Nazca Lines in southern Peru on Saturday, killing all 13 people on board. The aircraft, operated by local Peruvian airline Aerodiana, went down in the Pueblo Viejo region shortly after 13:00 local time, approximately six kilometres from the city of Nazca and around 400 kilometres south of the capital, Lima. Police Major Jorge Andrade confirmed the death toll from the crash site, noting that the severity of the fire that broke out immediately after impact prevented any rescues.

According to Peru's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism, all 11 passengers were foreign nationals: seven Italian citizens aged between 18 and 54, two Spaniards aged 52, and two Germans aged 77 and 78. The two crew members were identified as pilot Americo Salazar and copilot Irenka Guanilo del Carpio. The plane had departed from Pisco, a city with a small aerodrome roughly 240 kilometres south of Lima that serves as a hub for tourist flights in the region. Witnesses and emergency responders described arriving at a scene of twisted wreckage still smouldering hours after the crash, with firefighters working to extinguish the blaze.

The Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprising hundreds of vast geoglyphs — geometric shapes, stylised plants, and depictions of animals such as monkeys, hummingbirds and spiders — etched into the surface of the Nazca Desert more than 1,500 years ago. Because of their enormous scale, the figures are only fully visible from the air, making low-altitude tourist flights a well-established industry in the area. UNESCO describes the site as