We flew back to Santiago, then on to Calama, followed by a 1 hour drive to San Pedro de Atacama, a small town roughly in the center of the desert. San Pedro sits at about 8,000' elevation, and our 5 days of half and full days expeditions enabled us to explore regions to well over 14,000' and see the 20,000+' Andes bordering Argentina and Bolivia close by. Atacama is dry, averaging 0.6 inches of rainfall annually, with some regions averaging less than 0.1 inches. (The only drier areas in the world are a few valleys in Antarctica, which have recorded no precipitation.) Because the desert is so high and so dry, the sky is incredibly clear - darker blue than we've ever seen, and the night sky is astonishing. Many of the world's largest telescope arrays (radio and optical) are located on the mountains in the desert.
The dry environment and mountain location have produced incredible landscapes, including huge salt flats, salt water lakes, and one of world's largest geyser fields, surrounded by mostly extinct volcanoes. Incredibly there's a lot of wildlife here, including vicuña, emu, foxes, mice, flamingos and many other birds, as well as puma, and viscacha (member of chinchilla family that looks like a cross between a squirrel, a kangaroo, and a rabbbit).
Historically, the first human inhabitants of the area were the Atacameños about 10,000 years ago.. At this time the area wasn't as dry – some lakes & rivers due to end of recent glacial period.
Land dried up ~4,000 years ago, so today only the Rio Loa traverses Atacama from the Andes to the Pacific. Other streams end in salt flats or are underground and peter out.
By 3,000 years ago there were farming and llama-herding villages along the river & the salt flats. Starting around 600 CE, Tiwanaku culture (from Lake Titicaca) dominated the area. And the Incas took over by the 1400s. In 1557 Spanish invaded and took control.
Category:Travel and Places
Subcategory:South America
Subcategory Detail:Chile
Keywords:Atacama
© Ted Stump