Cal Orck'o Cretaceous Park Guide: 12,000 Dinosaur Footprints Wall in Sucre

Just five kilometres north-east of Sucre's colonial centre inside the active limestone quarry of the FANCESA cement factory rises Cal Orck'o (from Quechua Q'al Urqu, "Lime Hill"), the single largest, longest, and most diverse concentration of fossilised dinosaur footprints anywhere on Earth. Discovered fully in 1994 when quarry workers blasting away overburden hit a layer of pure, siliceous limestone that refused to fracture cleanly, the cliff face was surveyed in 1998 and 2015 by Swiss palaeontologist Christian Meyer and an international team, who documented more than 12,000 individual dinosaur footprints arranged in 462 continuous trackways across a single rock face measuring 1.5 kilometres long and up to 110 metres high.

1. How Dinosaurs Walked Up a Vertical Wall: The 68-Million-Year-Old Geology

First-time visitors looking across the quarry canyon at a sheer 70-degree cliff face crisscrossed by lines of footprints immediately ask how giant dinosaurs could walk up a vertical wall:

• From Maastrichtian Mudflat to Andean Tectonic Uplift: Roughly 68 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian stage, shortly before the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs), the Sucre basin was a shallow, warm freshwater lakeshore near sea level. Herds of plant-eating sauropods and packs of predatory theropods walked across the soft carbonate mudflat, after which sun baking and volcanic ash falls rapidly fossilised their deep footprints. Tens of millions of years later, the collision of the Nazca and South American tectonic plates uplifted the Andes and folded the horizontal lakeshore flat up into a 70-degree inclined wall.
• Record-Setting Trackways (Titanosaurs, Carnotaurus & "Johnny Walker"): At least fifteen distinct species left tracks on the El Molino Formation limestone, including 25-metre-long armoured titanosaurian sauropods, horned abelisaurid carnivores related to Carnotaurus, ornithopods, and ankylosaurs. The wall also holds the world record for the longest continuous dinosaur trackway ever recorded: a 581-metre trail nicknamed "Johnny Walker" left by a juvenile theropod walking diagonally across the entire cliff.

2. Visiting Parque Cretácico & Timing the Midday Wall Floor Walk

• Parque Cretácico Viewing Deck & Life-Size Models: Opened on the hill directly opposite the cliff in 2006, Parque Cretácico features 24 life-size fibreglass dinosaur sculptures (dominated by a 36-metre-long, 18-metre-tall Titanosaurus), an audio-visual museum, and high-powered binoculars aimed across the quarry.
• Don't Miss the Guided Midday Quarry Floor Walk (12:00 & 13:00): While viewing the cliff from the park terrace is impressive, the highlight of Cal Orck'o is putting on a hard hat with a park palaeontology guide to walk directly down into the quarry to the very base of the 110-metre footprint wall, standing inches from metre-wide sauropod tracks and three-toed theropod prints. These floor tours run only during the midday quarry break (typically at 12:00 and 13:00, Tuesday through Sunday; verify current departure times with the tourist office or the official Dinosaur Bus on Plaza 25 de Mayo).