Crescent-shaped sand dunes rise and fall steeply, some up to 100 metres (330 feet) high. The sun beats down on this part of northern Chile and it is exhausting to walk. Your boots sink deep into the golden sand.
But it is worth it, when you reach the ridges of the sand mountains near Copiapó and are rewarded with the sight of a dune landscape that never seems to end. South America’s answer to the Sahara, the southern part of the Atacama Desert is known as the Sea of Dunes (“Mar de Dunas”), with those dunes spanning 335 square kilometres (129 square miles). At 550 metres, El Medanoso is one of the highest dunes on the continent.
People snowboard down its steep slopes, while adrenaline junkies race through the sandy mountains in four-wheel-drive cars. But our desert hike is quiet. We are silent, solemn, in awe of the natural beauty.
The wind-sculpted wave patterns in the dunes could hardly be more perfect. Most Atacama tourists are drawn to the north of the desert, to San Pedro de Atacama, but it is much quieter some 800 kilometres (500 miles) further south. Tour guide Roberto Vergara shows us traces of scorpions, snakes and lizards in the sand as we walk some three hours to our destination.
High up on a broad dune, Gabriela Torres has set up a small table with local specialities in front of an off-road vehicle. Torres is a well-known cook in the Atacama region, famed for bringing many lost recipes from ancient desert tribes out of oblivion. She has raised indigenous regional cuisine to a new level and regularly joins desert tours organised by Vergara’s travel agency.
Seafood is on our menu, and this is no contradiction in the Atacama, as the sea of dunes borders the Pacific. That means we can look forward to fresh oysters, Chilean ceviche with quinoa, and pastel de jaiba, a kind of crab quiche. Served with a sweet and sour pisco cocktail, the meal is eaten as we sit on the sand and watch as the setting sun bathes the dunes in red-golden light.
A desert fox comes within a few metres of us, drawn by the smell. The Atacama is the driest place on earth beyond the polar regions, Vergara says. It is amazing that not only animals but also 200 endemic plant species can flourish in a place with so little water.
The Atacama receives just 0.5mm of rainfall per year on average, one-fiftieth of the average in California’s Death Valley. In some regions, rainfall has never been measured since records began, a peculiarity because of the location of the desert, Roberto says.
Stretching 1,200 kilometres, the Atacama Desert is squashed between the Andes in the east and the South American coast in the west, and is only 160 kilometres wide at most. While the humid air from the Amazon basin does not make it over the 6,000-metre-high mountains, the cold Humboldt Current from Antarctica prevents rain clouds from forming on the coast. But there has always been life in the desert.
Thousands of years ago, indigenous groups such as the Atacameños, Aymara and Chinchorros settled here. In the 15th century, the Atacama was part of the Inca empire, marked by an Inca trail across the region. In the Finca de Chañaral valley, Vergara shows us rock paintings made by the desert tribes.
Spanish colonial rulers paid less attention to the desert, but Chile, Peru and Bolivia were all the more interested, and after gaining independence they fought over the area and its valuable mineral resources in the Saltpetre War (1879-84). Gold, silver, copper and lithium are still extracted in mines in the south of the Atacama today, as is saltpetre, whose acid was once used to make gunpowder. A man who brings together the worlds of mining and food, Fidel Arcancibia began working below ground at the age of eight.
Nowadays he takes tourists to disused mines in the small gold mining town of Inca de Oro and shows them mineral and mining techniques in the Chañaral coastal mining area. He also invites us to his restaurant, where he serves goat stew and charqui dried meat with wheat purée as “mine cuisine”. We spend the night in a small mountain village called Agua Dulce with the indigenous Kolla tribe, an area home to 12 families surrounded by majestic mountains.
Iris Suarez shows us herbs that she uses for healing. Francisco Cortez is proud of his goat breeding. The villagers talk about traditions and their dying language.
We also learn about the starry sky from astro-tourism guide Carlos Araya, and how the Kolla people used it in their interpretations of life. This is a vivid place, high up in the Atacama, and even today there is virtually no ambient light. “We have 320 cloudless nights a year and no major cities nearby, which is why the sky here is pitch black,” Araya says.
Using his mobile professional telescope, Araya also shows us constellations, planets and the moon from an unusual perspective. “It’s the ideal place to observe the starry sky,” he says. No wonder the world’s largest space observatories are located in the region.
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