Chile’s Atacama Desert is, by some measures, the driest place on Earth. The salty earth here bumps up against an amphitheatre of camel-coloured hills and the ground has the texture of burnt pizza crust, cracking under the pressure of your boots. The air feels as if it’s whooshed in from some giant unseen hair dryer. Charles Darwin once referred to the Atacama as ‘a barrier far worse than the most turbulent ocean,’ hating just how empty it was and writing about it in his South American diaries with all the disdain he could muster. And yet, in my 1200 mile (2000 km) journey across the Atacama, I saw it in an entirely different light. I fell in love with everything Darwin seemed to despise.
The road to the desert
Spanning the entire upper third of Chile, the Atacama Desert is the very definition of arid. Legend has it that there are weather stations tucked into its thirsty core that have never once recorded a single drop of rain. Its landscapes are so alien that NASA uses them to test instruments for Mars.
My journey through this extra-dry desert began in earnest thanks to a realisation: I didn’t understand the country I was living in. I had just been through the 2019-2020 Estallido Social protest movement, which then segued into a five-month lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Being in Chile for those seminal events, and watching the local news each night, made me curious about things that I had taken for granted ever since moving to Chile in 2014. So I figured that if I was going to try and understand this country better, then what better place to start than the Atacama Desert, whose mines drive the Chilean economy, yet is so often written off locally as a wasteland.
Drier than dry
What I discovered was that the Atacama was anything but a wasteland. Far from it, sprawling geoglyphs and perfectly preserved mummies attest to thousands of years of human occupation, while snowmelt from the Andes and fog from the Pacific support an array of exotic animals. This superlative-rich land is home to Earth’s loftiest volcanoes, highest geysers and clearest skies. It’s also freckled with lithium, the mineral of the moment, which has prospectors abuzz. In short, it was a place I found that I could purposefully wander without considering myself lost.
The result of that journey is my book, Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert. It follows a months-long trip north from Santiago that began in late 2020 in the Elqui Valley, just south of the true Atacama. Elqui is home to Chile’s pisco industry, as well as some of the planet’s largest telescopes. Yet, what fascinated me most was its mystical aura. The valley was a haven for dreamers and dropouts, hippies and cults. It had a palpable connection between Earth and sky. I saw in the Elqui Valley a desert’s unique ability to absorb outsiders and foster big thinking.
Next, I travelled north to learn about the geography of the Atacama, which is squished between the Pacific and the Andes. Here, the Nazca tectonic plate, which lies off the coast, jams up against the South American plate and lifts the Andes Mountains at a rate of about an inch per year. These geologically young mountains have gotten so tall that they don’t permit humidity accumulating on their Pacific edge to pass through to the west. Any precipitation that manages to barrel across the largest expanse of water in the world typically gets sponged up by the cool Humboldt Current instead.
Ancient and modern
To try and make sense of this, I wanted to journey from sea to sky – or, at least, the cloud-hugging altiplano, the second largest high plateau on Earth after Tibet. Up here, well above 13000 feet (4000 metres ) in altitude, I found blinding salt flats whose turquoise lagoons were packed with pink flamingos. I also learned how these so-called salars are now threatened by lithium mining in our global race to transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to electric ones. Chile has the world’s largest lithium reserves.
Back in the valleys I turned my attention to power and politics, looking at how this poor land has made people preposterously rich, and at what cost. Some of Chile’s earliest labour movements began in the company towns of the saltpetre mines, which popped up across this desert during the nitrate boom between the 1880s and 1920s. At the Unesco-listed ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura, I traced the social movements of 100 years ago right up to the Estallido Social, looking at how similar demands from the working class have echoed across generations. I also explored some of this desert’s darkest days at abandoned nitrate ports like Pisagua, which was used as a prison camp and cemetery for those opposed to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Near the oasis of San Pedro de Atacama, I spent several weeks with an indigenous Likan Antai family who still practised traditional llama herding. They showed me how to read fortunes with coca leaves, interpret the dark spots of the Milky Way, and cook with traditional herbs like rica-rica, cachiyuyo and chañar. I also climbed the area’s volcanoes, explored its ancient ruins, and floated atop its salty lagoons. I then spent time with an Aymara chef near the oasis of Pica who uses solar powered ovens to cook with the sun.
Up near the Peruvian border, I saw how climate change was making the desert ‘bloom with bones’ as the world’s oldest artificially mummified remains, the Chinchorro mummies, were plainly emerging from their shallow graves due to increased humidity. I also visited the world’s largest humanoid geoglyph, the Atacama Giant, and saw vast rock walls carved in stories. Though I couldn’t always interpret them, they were clear expressions of the ways in which ancient settlers marked this land as their own.
The Atacama engima
Throughout my travels, I tried to make sense of my connection to this country, which I’ve now lived in for more than a decade, as well as my relationship to my Chilean partner of 15 years. The Atacama is a place where history fuses so tightly with mythology that you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. It’s an incubator of social change that’s been used as a dustbin for dissidents. It’s populated by down-and-out strugglers, but also society’s big winners. Thanks to its lithium reserves, the Atacama is everywhere these days, in your phones, your laptops and your cars.
The Atacama Desert always remained a bit of an enigma, whose contradictions don’t quite add up. And yet, I found that, while a forest might calm my mind, this desert lit it on fire. The high Atacama is, after all, a place with extreme levels of ultraviolet radiation. It couldn’t help but burn deeper into my daydreams, stuffing voids with thoughts and filling empty spaces with glittering memories.
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Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert is published by Rocky Mountain Books. For more information, visit Mark’s website, or follow him on X (Twitter) and Instagram.
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