Chile's Copper Capital Between Desert and Sea — the largest city in the Atacama Desert faces the Pacific from a dramatic cliff coast, built on Bolivian territory won in the War of the Pacific, and is the gateway to Valle de la Luna, the Atacama salt flats, and some of the clearest night skies in the world
Antofagasta is Chile's second-largest city by population north of Santiago — a city of 430,000 on the Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert at 23°S, the commercial capital of one of the world's most mineral-rich regions (the Atacama copper belt accounts for approximately 30% of global copper production). Antofagasta was Bolivian territory until the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), when Chile seized Bolivia's coastal province — landlocking Bolivia, a political wound that remains unresolved 140 years later. The city's dramatic setting — arid cliffs dropping straight to a turquoise Pacific, the cit…
The Atacama coast was inhabited by the Atacameño and Chango peoples for millennia before Spanish contact. The area became part of independent Bolivia after 1825. Antofagasta's modern history begins with the discovery of silver at Caracoles in 1870 and the subsequent nitrate and copper mining boom — Chilean and British capital financed most of the mining infrastructure in Bolivian territory, creating the economic tensions that led to the War of the Pacific. Chile's victory (1884) transferred Antofagasta and the entire Atacama coast to Chile, depriving Bolivia of its coastline — a loss Bolivia…