Part of the Chile Travel Guide
← Back to ChileThe Atacama Desert covers the north of Chile and holds a distinction that is hard to picture until you are in it: some weather stations here have never recorded rain. That absence shapes everything. The skies are so consistently clear that the world's major observatories are built here, the salt crusts and lava fields survive uneroded, and the landscape reads as closer to Mars than to anywhere else in the country.
Almost all of it is visited from San Pedro de Atacama, a small adobe town about an hour and fifteen minutes by road from Calama, the nearest airport. From that one main street you can reach the El Tatio geyser field before dawn, flamingos feeding on the Salar de Atacama, and altiplano lagoons above 14,000 feet. The altitude is the thing most people underestimate. San Pedro sits at around 2,400 meters and the excursions climb well beyond it, so the first day is best spent slowly.
We were here in April, which turned out to be an excellent time: warm days, genuinely cold pre-dawn starts, and very few other people on the tours.
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First-hand
How we've traveled the Atacama desert
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