The nitrate capital of the world — where Chilean boomtown fortunes were made in the Atacama desert and the UNESCO ghost town of Humberstone still shimmers in the heat
Iquique is a port city of 220,000 in northern Chile's Tarapacá region, sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert at 20° south latitude. It was the world's greatest producer of sodium nitrate (saltpetre) from the 1870s through the early 20th century — a commodity so economically vital it triggered the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), which Chile won from Bolivia and Peru, gaining the nitrate-rich Atacama coast. The city retains a striking Victorian-era Georgian-style centre, while 45km inland, the UNESCO-listed Humberstone ghost town preserves the ruins of the largest nitrate…
Iquique's indigenous Changos fishermen were displaced when the Chilean nitrate boom transformed the Atacama coast into one of the world's most profitable industrial frontiers. The city became fabulously wealthy during the salitreras era (1880s–1920s): Teatro Municipal (1890), the Palacio Astoreca (1904), and the ornate Georgian timber façades of Calle Baquedano were all built on nitrate profits. The invention of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer by Fritz Haber in 1909 slowly killed the industry; by the 1930s most oficinas (nitrate works) had closed and their populations drifted away — leaving Hum…