"You maniacs… you blew it up! Ah, damn you…" As you approach the enormous appendage rising out of the earth before you, it seems like the detritus of a long-gone civilization. Naturally, you can't help but channel the histrionic ending of that famous movie with the hirsute rulers. While this hulk of a hand may not possess the grace of one of Dürer's or El Greco's, nor in the plastic arts the finesse of those splayed fingers belonging to Rodin's Burghers of Calais, it confirms that art is found anywhere we're open to it.

After all, who would expect to come across a thirty-six-foot-tall concrete sculpture planted in the sand on this 3,500-foot-high desert plateau. On closer inspection, you're pleased to find the work in pretty good shape (considering it has weathered eighteen years), wowing all motorists who happen upon it as they cruise a vital north-south highway. Credit goes to a local organization whose members trek here twice a year for a clean-and-patch party and to scrub off graffiti like that tag on the thumb.

You're about fifty miles southeast of a coastal town that is both the regional and the provincial capital and was founded in the last century by a neighboring country—which promptly lost it to the nation you are in. The arid atmosphere here makes a perfect environment for a nearby mountaintop observatory. After you've gazed at the heavens, you'll want to see the area's numerous massive salt flats and an oasis town that lures adventure types.

A decade before he erected the hand, the native artist buried a set of fingers on the beach of a posh ocean resort to the east. They're still there and still enormously popular. What do all these digits signify? Your first guess might be that they have something to do with the hand of God, but that phrase means something else entirely on this continent. Should you get lost while puzzling over the meaning, you can always use this landmark as your… palm pilot.

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