The Driest Desert on Earth — Valle de la Luna at sunset, the Atacama salt flats with pink flamingos, the Tatio geysers at dawn, and the clearest night skies in the western hemisphere
San Pedro de Atacama is a small adobe village at 2,400 m elevation in the driest non-polar desert on Earth, where annual rainfall averages less than 1 mm and parts of the Atacama have never recorded any rainfall at all. It sits at the centre of one of the planet's most spectacular landscapes: the Salar de Atacama (the world's third-largest salt flat), the Valle de la Luna (a surreal moonscape of eroded salt, clay, and rock that glows gold and purple at sunset), the El Tatio geyser field (the world's highest-altitude geyser field at 4,500 m, active at dawn), and high-altitude lagoons coloured…
The Atacama region has been inhabited for at least 12,000 years — the driest conditions on earth actually preserve organic material extraordinarily well, and the Atacama holds some of the oldest mummies in the world, predating Egyptian mummification by thousands of years. The Atacameño (or Lickanantay) people established a sophisticated civilization around the Atacama oases, developing irrigation systems and trading across the Andes with Tiwanaku and later Inca civilizations. The Inca Empire incorporated the Atacama in the late 15th century, building the road system (Qhapaq Ñan) that passed t…