Atacama Desert travel, tours and holiday packages

A short guide about Atacama Desert

In the North of Chile, is the Atacama Desert, a virtually rainless plateau in South America covering an area about one fifth of the country. It is about 600 miles long, but less than 100 miles wide between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It is created by the rain shadow of the Andes, east of the desert and made up of salt basins, sand and lava flows. It is believed to be more than 15 million years old and is 50 times more arid than California's Death Valley. There has not been rain from 1570 to 1971 and the mountains are completely free of glaciers, studies by British scientists suggest that some river beds have been dry for 120,000 years. The soil has been compared to Mars and due to this appearance it has been used for filming Mars scenes, most notably in the television series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets.

Not surprisingly the Atacama is sparsely populated, but in this desert lays the village of ‘San Pedro de Atacama’ in an oasis elevated at about 2000 metres, still with its church built by the Spanish in 1577. From here you can see llamas, sheep and goats, and three kinds of flamingos in the oasis. The desert was rich in deposits of copper and minerals, and had the world's largest natural supply of sodium nitrate, which was mined on a large scale until the early 1940s (due to the invention of synthetic nitrate), leaving old mines and deserted mining towns.

Among its many spectacular geological regions is the Valley of the Moon and the Salar de Atacama (a dried lake bed). In the desert you’ll find geoglyphs: huge ancient drawings of animals and the Giant of the Atacama. These geoglyphic paintings adorn the hillsides and are visible through olive groves from the road and stand out even more clearly from the air. These gigantic drawings of which the most important are those of Lluta, Azapa, Pintados, Cerro Unitas and Tiliviche remain wrapped in mystery to this day.

The Atacama Desert is of archaeological importance and the beauty and rarity of its lomas formations in the region provide opportunities for tourism to be combined with scientific studies. Lomas are a highly endemic plant community occurring near-shore from ocean fog. Now controlled through supervision, lomas are creating a natural oasis, enjoyed by the public. Temperatures are mostly comfortable year round, except at the higher elevations bordering the Andes where it can get quite cold, so the best time to visit is during Chile’s summer October-June. Tourabout has many holiday packages covering South America that include a visit to this unique region providing an adventurous round trip.