Atacama Desert Trips & Tours

Atacama Desert Trips & Tours

A lunar landscape squashed between the Pacific and the Andes and home to ultimate desert adventures

We’d hazard a guess that the arid Atacama is pretty high-up on most Chilean bucket-lists – and we wouldn’t argue with that. The Martian-like terrain of one of the driest places on the planet is not only spectacularly scenic but also surprising, exciting and an excellent playground for adventurers, wildlife enthusiasts and anyone with a camera. First up, the landscape. It’s everything you would expect a desert to be – rusty vastness, glinting salt pans, craggy rocks and weird, layer-cake formations – and a little bit more. We’re talking spurting, hissing geysers, flocks of candy-pink flamingo, oases and cacti-studded ravines, and a cast of wildlife that includes llamas, alpacas, vizcacha and, if you’re lucky, vicuñas. So, how to see and do it all? Handily a crop of dreamy, desert-chic hotels has recently cropped up in the outpost of San Pedro, the jumping-off point for most travellers, offering 4WD drives, fat-biking and geyser-hiking, sunset picnics, sand-boarding experiences, wildlife walks, and even horse-back rides. All are designed for minimum environmental impact – yet maximum visuals! – keeping this ethereal landscape just the way it should be.