SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA – you can get there but it will cost you
This northern Atacama Desert tourist town sits at the edge of the Atacama Salar, at a spring that was first used by indigenous people, and later developed by Spanish explorers. Today explorers for novelty channel through San Pedro de Atacama as the start or end of the central Andes Gringo Trail, which runs up through Bolivia to La Paz, around Lake Titicaca, and finishes with Cusco and Machu Picchu. San Pedro de Atacama was founded in 1536, and the small sun-baked plaza features a highly photographed white-washed adobe chapel. The streets are all narrow dirt alleys, the sidewalks can barely be called as such, and they are just wide enough for a dog to sleep in the shade on a hot day. Most of the buildings are fashioned from adobe and reeds, making single story row-type structures with flat-roofs, in a place where it hardly ever rains.
In part the town itself is an attraction, perhaps for the wrong reasons, because more truly adobe villages around are found throughout Bolivia and Peru, but this is as Andean as Chile can get for appearance. The place exists because of tourists. So the businesses present in the town are tourist agencies, backpacker hostels, and very expensive boutique hotels. Throw in souvenirs shops selling alpaca goods made in Peru and Bolivia, and restaurants, plus one very hard to find gas station, and this is San Pedro de Atacama. The food is more expensive than the typical costly Chilean fares, and many establishments are passable for their ambiance if not for the food quality. In fact, the town is better for washing away desert dust with cold beers.
Tour agencies thrive on multi-day packaged trips running through the salars of Bolivia. One has all the mountain bike rentals, and guided hikes up volcanoes that you could ask for. On the Chilean side, tourist destinations include in order of importance, Tatio geysers, Valle de Luna, Puritama hot springs, Yerba Buena petroglyphs that features many llamas, the salt-encrusted light blue waters of Laguna Cejar overlooked in the distance by Licancabur volcano, and down south in a long drive the stunning Salar de Aguas Calientes with its sharply contrasting ledge of red rocks. The Bolivian tours hit highlights of Laguna Verde, Salar de Uyuni, and many will go on to visit the mining center of Potosi. Many of the Chilean sights can be seen without agency organization, just rent a truck at the Calama airport and drive to see them yourself.
Our favourite hotel, costly for what it is, is called Hostería San Pedro De Atacama. It is nice because these reasons; one, it’s near the “hard to find” gas station, and two, within walking distance to San Pedro de Atacama’s main and nearly singular street of tourist venues. For a more upscale venue, see Explora Atacama-Hotel Larache. There are many more to select from.
When it does rain in the Atacama, such as in a notable event in February of 2015, the town turns to mud. Large muddy puddles and the dirt roads going out to the hot springs wash out with debris flows. Perhaps nothing is more surreal than experiencing heavy rains in the world’s driest desert. Or more exciting seeing active flash floods cross the highway!
Many authors struggle with the characterization of San Pedro de Atacama, including travel guides, and focus on the extreme aridity, but the fact is what makes this entire region interesting to tourists is the geology. Most visitors do not really know it, but the lack of vegetation has 100 percent exposed rock, and these rocks give the color, the contrasts, and the textures to the surrounding landscape. The very basin that San Pedro de Atacama sits in formed from tectonics, faulting, and is bound on the west by an uplifted range, the Cordillera de la Sal, which forms the Valle de Luna National Park.
Again, it was shaped by Miocene folding, faulting, thrusting, and deformation of the crust- geology. This is very evident on the highway overlook to the west of the town where looking east is a spectacular angular unconformity. It is the mesa lands sloping down to the Atacama basin, extensive surfaces, all formed by the tops of relatively recent ash flow tuff beds erupted from massive calderas in Bolivia. These welded and unwelded cream to pinkish colored tuffs form the rocks around the hot spring Puritama and the wind eroded cliff faces making the canvass for the Yerba Buena petroglyphs. The pyramid-shaped active volcanoes dominating the skyline to the east are part of the very extensive Central Volcano Zone. These are the heat engines that supply the hot springs, and make El Tatio, the world’s third largest geyser field. It is not biology, or culture, or the trinkets imported for sale in San Pedro de Atacama that makes the mind captivating surroundings, it is exposed geology.
San Pedro de Atacama is the trekker’s ephemeral layover; the majority of the people in the town at any one time are just passing through. The place is prone to being a 21st century hippies’ magnet, where wearing sandals is the only dress code. It provides a great base for exploration, and is one of South America’s meccas for photographers. It places in the top five areas to visit in Chile, again for what your can do in the region- just do not expect too much from this little town of dried mud. And the cost one pays is not just monetary, once you experience the region payment is made in memories, a mental debt that everyone will spend time recalling what they have seen, and no one can take it away.
If you like the blue doors of San Pedro de Atacama check our collection of “Doors of South America”, and as always we encourage you to leave us a comment, and share this post with your friends!
Do connect with us:
ResearchGate: James M. Wise
Author´s page: James M. Wise
Photography page: JamesM.Wise.com
Twitter: JamesM_Wise
Facebook: Yanira K. Wise
Author´s page: Yanira K. Wise
Instagram: yanirak.wise
Twitter: @YK_Wise
Facebook for South America to the World
South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.
