What a contrast! Really hard to imagine such a dramatic transition

"Huacachina: Ensconced in the center of hundreds of miles of Peruvian desert..."

Think of it in context of The Transect.

Via Pro Traveller

See also: Last gasp for the Lourdes of the Americas

Update:  And in fact that little oasis "ensconced in the center of hundreds of miles of Peruvian desert" is also part of the city of Ica, which before the terrible earthquake of 2007 had 200,000 residents. So much for truth in photography. And thank goodness for Google Earth

 

Comments

[Sandy Sorlien]

Calibration to local transect:

Sand: T1 Natural Zone
Town: left side T4 General Urban, middle T5 Urban Center, right side Civic Space, with T3 Sub-Urban Zone along the lake. As this town is obviously smaller than a pedestrian shed, it is either TND or Hamlet form according to new urbanist principles.

This form isn't unusual. Medieval towns tend to have this abrupt transition from the urban to the rural. They are walled and/or in valleys surrounded by T2 farmland. The T-zone diagram used for coding is just an abstraction; rural-to-urban patterns don't always occur in linear or concentric form, though they often do in America, or did before the American transect sprawled out like a melting snowball .

You can't stump me, o skeptic of the transect.

Sandy