18 interesting facts about the Atacama Desert

Get ready to learn about these fascinating Atacama Desert facts and explore the wonders of the driest desert in the world.

Imagine a place that looks like the surface of Mars, surrounded by vast salt plains, volcanic craters and surreal rock formations.

Welcome to the Atacama Desert.

With an environment that is as harsh as it’s beautiful, it’s a place like no other. I’ve explored it twice: first on a week-long road trip in a campervan, covering about 1,000 miles of salt flats, lagoons and high mountain passes, and then in July with a private guide who grew up in nearby Calama and seemed to know everything about the region’s geography and culture. Let’s take a journey through these little-known facts, taking in ancient Inca trails and incredible night skies along the way.

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Interesting facts about the Atacama Desert

Is the Atacama Desert the driest place on Earth?

Yep. The Atacama is not only the driest non-polar desert in South America but also in the entire world.

Parts of this desert are so dry that they receive less than a measly one millimetre of rainfall per year, and the desert as a whole averages only around 15 mm. Some weather stations here have never recorded a single tiny droplet of rain, and there’s evidence that parts of the desert went without any significant rainfall at all between 1570 and 1971.

Where is the Atacama Desert located?

The Atacama Desert sits between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Coast of South America, stretching for about 1,600 km through northern Chile and covering roughly 105,000 square kilometres. Interestingly, the desert shouldn’t be so dry since it’s near the coast.

So, what makes this desert parched? The two gigantic mountain chains, the Andes and the Coastal mountains, surrounding the Atacama Desert block the moisture the coast and Amazon produce from entering the desert to form clouds. On the Pacific side, the cold Humboldt Current and a near-permanent zone of high pressure keep rain clouds from forming in the first place.

Most visitors base themselves in San Pedro de Atacama, a small adobe town at about 2,400 metres above sea level. The whole of its commune, which takes in villages such as Toconao and Socaire, had just under 11,000 residents at the last published census. The Tropic of Capricorn also runs through the desert south of town, and there’s a roadside marker on the way to the high altiplano lakes. If you want to get your bearings, my Atacama Desert map pins all the main sights.

What is the Atacama Desert known for?

Apart from being the driest non-polar desert on the planet, the Atacama is also the world’s largest fog desert.

This is when fog drip supplies the majority of moisture to animals and plants living in a desert.

Imagine surviving on evaporated water: nature is astounding. My two cents aside, the fog forms when moist air from the Pacific runs up against the steep cliffs of the coastal mountains. Chileans call this sea fog the camanchaca, and along the coast people have strung up giant fog-catching nets to harvest drinking water from it.

The driest desert in the world sometimes bursts into flower

It sounds like a contradiction, but every few years parts of the Atacama turn pink, purple and yellow. When enough rain falls in winter (usually 15 mm or more), seeds that have lain dormant in the sand for years sprout all at once. The result is the desierto florido, or flowering desert: more than 200 species, most of them found nowhere else, carpeting the coastal valleys and plains between Copiapó and Vallenar.

It doesn’t happen to a timetable. There were big blooms in 2015, 2017, 2021 and 2022. In July 2024, flowers appeared in the middle of winter for the first time in about a decade, and the spring of 2025 brought one of the best displays on record. Heavy rain in July and August 2026 set off another bloom, with the first flowers appearing in late August.

The flowers usually peak between late September and October and can last into November. The best place to see them is the Parque Nacional Desierto Florido, created in 2023 about 30 km south of Copiapó. Entry is free, it’s open from Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 6pm, and picking the flowers is strictly forbidden. It’s a long way south of San Pedro de Atacama, so treat it as a separate trip. My guide to the best time to visit Chile will help you plan around it.

What makes the Atacama Desert unique?

While there are many reasons why this desert is so unique, did you know that Chile mines nearly a quarter of the world’s copper, much of it from the Atacama? Escondida, south-east of the port city of Antofagasta, is the largest copper mine on the planet.

The Atacama Desert continues to provide the globe with valuable metal and non-metal resources despite the collapse of the nitrate business. Iron, silver, gold, boron and lithium are among the resources mined here.

The desert contains the largest supply of sodium nitrate in the world

Being a desert with arid conditions, it’s no surprise that sodium nitrate deposits would dominate Atacama’s surface.

This led to the world’s largest natural supply and, eventually, a nitrate boom from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. Control of the nitrate fields was one of the causes of the War of the Pacific (1879 to 1884), which left Chile in control of land that had belonged to Peru and Bolivia. The boom collapsed once synthetic nitrates arrived after the First World War, and the now abandoned mining towns dotted all over the desert are the only things left to show for this bustling period. Two of them, Humberstone and Santa Laura, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Sodium nitrate, which is basically a salt, is a huge hit among manufacturers producing fertilisers and explosives.

Much of the world’s lithium lies under its salt flats

The Salar de Atacama, the vast salt flat south of San Pedro, covers around 3,000 square kilometres. Beneath its crust is a lithium-rich brine, which is pumped into enormous evaporation ponds that dry in the desert sun. The lithium ends up in the batteries of phones and electric cars around the world.

Chile produced about a fifth of the world’s mined lithium in 2025, nearly all of it from this one salt flat, and it holds around a quarter of the world’s known reserves, according to the US Geological Survey. At the end of 2025, state-owned Codelco and the mining company SQM formed a joint venture, NovaAndino Litio, to run operations here until 2060.

It isn’t without controversy. Lickanantay communities and scientists have raised concerns about how much water the industry uses, and a 2022 study linked falling flamingo numbers on the salar to a mix of climate change and lithium mining. The salt flat is also home to Laguna Chaxa, part of the Los Flamencos National Reserve, where I watched flamingos feeding in the shallows.

Volcanoes over 5,000 metres tower above it

The eastern edge of the Atacama is lined with volcanoes, and they’re never out of sight. The most famous is Licancabur, a near-perfect cone of 5,916 metres that straddles the border with Bolivia and looms over San Pedro de Atacama. A small lake fills its summit crater, one of the highest lakes in the world, and the Inca built ceremonial structures up there too. From the Bolivian side, it’s the backdrop to Laguna Verde, which I glimpsed peeking through the volcanoes on my campervan trip.

Then there’s Lascar (5,592 metres), the most active volcano in the northern Chilean Andes. From the Atacama basin it looks snow-capped and purple against the blue sky, and I watched the sun come up behind it. Its biggest recorded eruption, in April 1993, sent ash more than 20 km into the sky, with a light dusting reported as far away as Buenos Aires. It has had smaller explosions since, including one in December 2022, and Chile’s geological service raised its alert level again in 2025 and in March 2026 before lowering it back to green.

All that altitude takes some getting used to. On my campervan trip I drove the road towards Argentina at 4,900 metres, sharing it with truckers hell-bent on taking every slope and turn at the greatest possible speed, and I had the vague feeling that I might be dreaming. Before I set off, I was told to “walk up like an old man and you’ll be able to come down like a young bull”. It suddenly made sense on the hike up to the Piedras Rojas, at over 4,000 metres, where every step felt like a sprint.

El Tatio is the largest geyser field in the Southern Hemisphere

At around 4,320 metres, the El Tatio geysers make up the third-largest geyser field on Earth, after Yellowstone and Russia’s Valley of Geysers, and the biggest south of the equator. Because the air is so thin up here, water boils at only about 86°C.

The field is at its most active at sunrise, when the freezing air meets the hot water and steam billows from dozens of vents at once. That means a very early start: I left San Pedro de Atacama at 3am for the drive of about an hour and a half, and it was -15°C when I got there. My guide called the moment the rising sun lit up the steam in different colours “nature’s fireworks”, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I’ve been twice: once at the end of my campervan trip, after a night in the tiny hamlet of Guatín to shorten the drive, and again with my guide.

The Atacama Desert is one of the best places for stargazing

Yes. The Atacama Desert is among the best places to admire the Milky Way.

Don’t believe me? You should.

To give you a small taste of this unparalleled experience: Imagine the clearest, most unpolluted night skies, barely a cloud in sight and heavenly bodies dazzling so brightly that you feel hypnotised.

Okay, now back to earth, allow me to speak some facts. Many astrophiles consider Chile’s Atacama Desert the best spot (globally) to view the twinkling stars. Gaze upon the Southern Hemisphere’s most renowned sights, like the Southern Cross constellation, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Tarantula Nebula inside it.

On my first night of the campervan trip I parked up by Laguna Tebinquinche, only to realise I’d left my remote shutter release at home in the UK. I spent hours holding my breath and handling the camera as gently as I could to stop it shaking. On my second trip I stayed at Nayara Alto Atacama, which has its own observatory, and I took some of my best photos of the Atacama skies there after the evening session finished. My guide to stargazing in the Atacama Desert has more tips.

It’s home to one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes

The same dry, thin air that makes the stargazing so good has drawn the world’s astronomers here. On the Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres above sea level, sits ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array): 66 giant antennas that work together as a single telescope, studying everything from the birth of stars to the cold gas between galaxies. It was inaugurated in 2013 and is run by a partnership that includes Europe, North America and East Asia.

ALMA used to run free weekend tours of its support facility, about 35 km from San Pedro de Atacama, but public visits are currently suspended, and the high site with the antennas has never been open to visitors. Check the ALMA website before you go. In the meantime, the many Atacama Desert tours that run stargazing sessions from San Pedro are the easiest way to get your astronomy fix.

Fun facts about the Atacama Desert

NASA uses the Atacama Desert for testing instruments

As if UFOs aren’t trending enough already, NASA tested life-detecting tech in the Atacama Desert to determine if it would work on Mars.

They chose this location for its stark resemblance to the red planet. In fact, the Atacama is one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth, according to the experts at NASA. Its soils are so dry and so low in life that scientists use them to work out how to spot traces of microbes on another planet, and NASA has sent prototype drilling rovers here to practise hunting for them below the surface.

It’s home to the oldest artificially mummified human remains

Here’s an Atacama Desert fact that will have you scratching your head. You know how creepy stuff always happens in the middle of nowhere? Turns out they’ve discovered the oldest artificial mummies in the world in this very desert.

What’s more, these mummies predate the ones found in Egypt by around two thousand years, which is crazy considering no one really knows about this.

They were made by the Chinchorro people, who lived along the coast around Arica, and the oldest known example, a child from the Camarones Valley, dates to around 5050 BC. Compare that to early Egyptian mummies, from around 3,000 BC. You’ll sometimes see an earlier date of around 7020 BC quoted, but that belongs to Acha Man, who was mummified naturally by the dry desert rather than by human hands. The Chinchorro sites became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.

There are flamingos in the Atacama Desert

Despite having such harsh conditions that very few animals can survive, this desert is home to a bird you’d typically associate with tropical weather.

The Atacama Desert’s three species of flamingo (James’s, Chilean and Andean) are resilient creatures that have adapted to some of the harshest conditions, like freezing nights and water far saltier than the sea (sheesh). James’s flamingo is the smallest of the three. The Andean flamingo is listed as Vulnerable, and the other two as Near Threatened.

These unique adaptations help them to flourish where other species would struggle. They even have special salt glands in their heads, allowing them to drink and process salt water. And their tough skin prevents them from turning into a flamingo casserole!

Their pink colour comes from the algae and tiny crustaceans they eat, rather than from birth, which is why young flamingos are a dull greyish white. Laguna Chaxa, on the Salar de Atacama, is known for all three species. When I walked its path, the flamingos were ranging over the water with their weirdly stilted, uncoordinated walk, stalking off to the next pool whenever I got too close. I also saw them on the remote high-altitude salt flats near the Argentine border, and if you go floating in Laguna Cejar, carry on to the next lagoon along, which is a favourite with the local flamingos.

Vicuñas and viscachas thrive at altitude

Flamingos aren’t the only wildlife up here. The vicuña, a slender wild relative of the llama, lives between about 3,200 and 4,800 metres, and its wool is among the finest in the world. Hunting reduced vicuñas to about 6,000 animals in the 1960s, but protection has worked: there are now around 350,000, and they’re no longer considered threatened. You’ll find them all over the high Atacama, though you have to look carefully, as their coats blend perfectly with the hills.

After my second visit to El Tatio, instead of heading straight back to San Pedro, I stopped for a picnic breakfast in a river valley a short drive from the geysers. Nobody else was there, and breakfasting with a backdrop of vicuñas and rheas (the long-legged, flightless birds of the altiplano) was the perfect way to continue what had already been a spectacular morning.

Keep an eye on the rocks, too. The viscacha looks like a rabbit with a long, curly tail but is actually a cousin of the chinchilla, and you’ll often find them basking on the rocks in the midday sun. That’s exactly where I spotted one on the way back from the geysers.

Humans have lived in the desert since the Stone Age

Is there any place our ancestors couldn’t make into a home?

Seemingly not, since humans have inhabited this desert since the Palaeolithic, or the Old Stone Age. And if you paid attention in history class, you’ll know that’s a very long time ago: hunter-gatherers were camping by the lakes of the high Atacama around 13,000 years ago.

These inhabitants survived the Atacama Desert and thrived in these intense conditions, giving birth to several indigenous cultures.

This includes the Chinchorro culture on the coast and the Atacameño, or Lickanantay, people, whose descendants still live in the villages around San Pedro de Atacama. Their ancestors built the 12th-century hilltop fortress of Pukará de Quitor just outside town. The Inca later pushed their road network, the Qhapaq Ñan, through the desert, and you can still trace a stretch of it running dead straight across the Atacama salt flat. Further south, the El Molle and Las Ánimas cultures came before the Diaguita.

Some believe that they’ve found aliens in the desert

You knew this was coming: mention NASA once, and the tinfoil hats suddenly appear.

The Atacama Desert continues to be a hot topic among E.T. enthusiasts, all thanks to the tiny humanoid skeleton discovered here. Nicknamed Ata, it was found in 2003 in La Noria, an abandoned nitrate mining town.

And when I say tiny, I mean it, these skeletal remains measured only about 15 cm long. That’s half a ruler, but I’m not done yet: apparently, its ribs and head were narrow and elongated (talk about eerie).

Scientists later sequenced its DNA and, in a 2018 study, proved it was human: most likely a baby girl who was born prematurely or stillborn, with rare genetic mutations affecting bone growth. Those mutations explain why its bones looked like those of a six-year-old.

I’ll leave the speculation up to you, but for now, those scientists are getting major side-eye from many conspiracy theorists.

There are also penguins in the Atacama Desert

Again, this is the type of bird you’d associate with Antarctica, winter, and snow. The last place you expect them to be is in the driest desert in South America. This mystifying area continues to shove the unexpected in our faces, and I’m here for it.

The Humboldt penguin, a medium-sized critter closely related to the African penguin, calls this desert home.

You’ll find these waddling cuties along the arid coastal regions of the Atacama Desert. For your peace of mind, they escape the heat by swimming in the nearby Humboldt Current. They’re listed as Vulnerable, and the best places to see them are Pan de Azúcar National Park and the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve, where boats head out to the islands from Caleta Chañaral de Aceituno and Punta de Choros.

Read next: more on the Atacama

• The best things to do in the Atacama Desert
• Incredible places to visit in Chile
• My Atacama Desert itinerary
• Where to stay in the Atacama Desert
• Visiting the Valle de la Luna
• Photos of the Atacama’s incredible landscapes

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