Chile: San Pedro de Atacama – Desert Tour
Salt, Sand and a Rusty Bus: An Afternoon in the Atacama Desert
After the previous day’s fairly heroic exercise in getting from one place to another — the details of which I shall spare you, but which involved the sort of travelling that leaves you questioning your life choices — I woke up in San Pedro de Atacama in a condition best described as comprehensively done in. Not the romantic, poetic exhaustion of someone who has been climbing mountains or swimming with dolphins, but the flat, grey tiredness of a man in his sixties who has spent too long in transit and whose body has filed a formal complaint.
I gave myself the morning off. Not merely a relaxed morning, but a morning of deliberately, aggressively doing nothing. I ate breakfast. I sat. I may have stared at a wall for a period of time I cannot precisely account for. I recommend all of this without reservation. The guilt that is supposed to accompany such idleness never materialised, which I took as a sign that I had needed it more than I realised. The breakfast, for the record, was excellent — eggs, bread, fresh fruit, strong coffee — and I ate it without rushing, which is, if you think about it, one of the small unremarked pleasures that most of us have almost entirely forgotten how to do.
By early afternoon, however, I had remembered that I had booked a tour. This was past-me doing present-me a favour, and I was grateful, if slightly grudging about it. I have something of a complicated relationship with organised tours — they tend towards a particular kind of relentless enthusiasm that can feel a bit much when you are already emotionally fragile after a long journey — but I had done my research, the reviews were good, and more to the point, I had already paid. So off I went.
🏜️ A Word About Where You Actually Are
Before getting into the afternoon, it is worth saying something about the Atacama Desert itself, because it is not quite like anywhere else on the planet — and I do not mean that in the way travel writers say that about places that are, in fact, quite a lot like several other places. I mean it literally.
The Atacama stretches for roughly 1,600 kilometres along the Pacific coast of northern Chile, wedged between two mountain ranges: the Andes to the east, which form one of the most dramatic land barriers on Earth, and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west, which blocks moisture coming in off the Pacific. The result of this geographical double-act is that almost no rain falls here at all. Some weather stations in the Atacama have never, in the entire history of their operation, recorded a single drop of rainfall. Not a light drizzle. Not a passing shower. Nothing.
It holds the distinction of being the driest non-polar desert on Earth, a fact that sounds like the kind of thing someone says to win an argument at a pub quiz, but is simply true. For comparison, the Sahara — which most of us think of as the definitive example of relentless dryness — gets significantly more rainfall than parts of the Atacama. The aridity here is the result not just of the mountains blocking moisture but also of a cold ocean current called the Humboldt Current, which runs northward along the Chilean and Peruvian coastline and suppresses the evaporation that would normally produce rain-bearing clouds. The desert has been hyperarid for an estimated 10 to 15 million years. It is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.
NASA, which has its own reasons for being interested in places that resemble other planets, has used the Atacama to test equipment intended for Mars. The surface soil conditions, the mineral composition, the near-total absence of moisture, the extreme ultraviolet radiation — they are close enough to Martian conditions that rovers and drilling equipment have been put through their paces out here before being pointed at the red planet. Standing in parts of the Atacama, you do get an odd sensation that the planet has briefly forgotten what it is supposed to look like.
And yet people have lived here for a very long time indeed. The Chinchorro people were present in the region from around 7,000 BCE — roughly 9,000 years ago — and they developed a tradition of artificially mummifying their dead that predates the Egyptian mummy-making tradition by several thousand years. The Chinchorro mummies, some of which have been found along the northern Chilean and southern Peruvian coast, are among the oldest preserved human remains anywhere in the world. The Atacama’s dryness, which you might think would make human habitation impossible, actually preserves organic material extraordinarily well. The desert has, in its own austere way, been a rather good archivist.
San Pedro de Atacama, the small town from which our tour departed, sits at approximately 2,400 metres above sea level. At that altitude, the air is noticeably thin — not so thin that you immediately feel terrible, but thin enough that any exertion reminds you it is there. The town itself is a compact, dusty grid of adobe buildings, most of them pale brown or terracotta, with a small central square and a seventeenth-century church that has been repaired and rebuilt so many times it has become something of a philosophical exercise in what continuity actually means. The streets are unpaved in the older parts of town. It has a certain low-key charm without being fussy about it.
⛰️ The Salt Mountains
Our group for the afternoon was small: myself and a young Brazilian couple, both of them doctors, travelling together. I found their profession quietly reassuring. Out in the desert, with the nearest hospital a good distance away, it was pleasant to know that if I went over on an ankle or developed some sudden inexplicable ailment, there were qualified people present. They were also excellent company — relaxed, curious, with a good eye for the absurd, which turned out to be exactly the right quality for a desert afternoon.
Our guide drove us out of San Pedro in a comfortable four-wheel-drive van and headed first for the Cordillera de la Sal — which translates, with characteristic directness, as the Salt Mountains.
The name tells you something. Seeing them tells you considerably more. The Cordillera de la Sal is a range of hills rising roughly 200 metres above the floor of the Salar de Atacama basin, and the extraordinary thing about them is what they are made of. Not granite. Not sandstone. Salt, gypsum, clay and layered mineral deposits, compressed and folded over approximately 20 million years into a series of angular, glittering ridges that look like nothing so much as a particularly ambitious piece of modernist sculpture that has been left out in the weather.
The geological backstory goes something like this. Where the Cordillera de la Sal now stands, there was once a vast, highly saline lake — part of a much larger system of ancient water bodies that covered much of this region before the Andes were the Andes. As the tectonic collision between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate continued to push the land upward — a process that has been ongoing for roughly 25 million years and shows no particular sign of stopping — the layers of ancient lake sediment were compressed, folded and eventually thrust upward and sideways. Wind and temperature did the rest. The Atacama experiences extreme daily temperature swings: scorching in the direct sun of the afternoon, near-freezing after dark. That kind of repeated thermal stress, applied over millions of years, cracks rock and sculpts it in ways that no human hand could replicate.
Walking among the formations, you notice things that are easy to miss in photographs. The sound underfoot, for one thing — a faint crackling and crunching as the surface salt crystals respond to the shifting afternoon light and the warmth of your footsteps. The colours, for another: streaks of ochre, pale cream, deep rust and grey running through the rock face in bands that represent distinct geological periods, each one a chapter in a very slow story. Our guide explained the geology with the unhurried ease of someone who genuinely finds the subject interesting, which made a considerable difference. I have been on tours where the guide is clearly working from a script they have stopped believing in. This was not that.
🌊 Where the Ocean Used to Be
From the Salt Mountains we drove to the Llano de la Paciencia — the Plain of Patience — and if the name strikes you as curious, it struck me that way too.
The Llano is a long, flat depression of sand and gravel running alongside the Salar de Atacama. Geologically it is classified as a thrust sheet top basin — which is geologist for a broad, relatively level surface formed by tectonic compression. The name is sometimes explained as a reference to the landscape’s quality of vast, waiting stillness: a place so wide and quiet that patience seems to be not just a virtue but a condition of simply being there. I am not entirely sure whether this explanation was invented after the name was already in use, or whether it is genuinely the origin, but either way it seems apt.
What stopped me in my tracks, though, was the guide’s explanation of what the Llano used to be. The sandy surface beneath your feet was once the floor of a prehistoric ocean. In an earlier geological era, the Pacific extended significantly further inland than it does today. The sediment underfoot — the pale, fine-grained sand that shifts in the slight breeze and gets into absolutely everything — is the accumulated residue of that vanished sea, deposited over millions of years when this ground was underwater.
You are standing at roughly 2,300 metres above the current Pacific coastline. There are dry mountains on every horizon. The nearest water of any significance is a salar — a salt flat — that is itself the remnant of a long-evaporated lake. And yet, once upon a time, this was ocean floor. I stood there for a moment and tried to make that idea feel real, and largely failed, which I think is the correct response. Some facts about geological time simply refuse to be properly digested. You acknowledge them, nod politely, and move on.
🚌 The Bus
This, I have to say, was the part of the afternoon I had been least expecting and most enjoyed.
About eight kilometres from San Pedro, in a sub-valley of the Cordillera de la Sal known as the Vallecito sector, there is a bus. Just a bus. No road leading to it, no stop, no sign, no accompanying infrastructure of any kind. It sits in the desert in a gentle depression among salt-white ridges, facing no particular direction, looking as though it made a unilateral decision sometime in the mid-twentieth century to stop going wherever it was going and simply remain here.
It is known locally as the Magic Bus. The guide was careful to add that the magic is largely retrospective — meaning, I understood, that nobody called it the Magic Bus when it was operational. It got that name later, once it had achieved the status of an interesting curiosity rather than a piece of working machinery that someone was responsible for fixing.
The full history of the bus is not entirely settled, but the broad outline seems to be this. During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the Atacama region was the scene of considerable industrial activity centred on the extraction of sodium nitrate — known as saltpetre — which was used in fertilisers and explosives and was, for a period, extraordinarily valuable. Chile’s nitrate industry transformed the country’s economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Towns grew up in the desert almost overnight; ports were built; fortunes were made. The War of the Pacific, fought between 1879 and 1884, was in significant part a war over nitrate territory, with Chile eventually defeating Bolivia and Peru and annexing the mineral-rich northern regions that now contain much of the Atacama.
The industry began to collapse in the 1920s, when German chemists developed a synthetic method of producing nitrogen compounds that made natural saltpetre largely redundant. The nitrate towns — the so-called oficinas salitreras — were abandoned with remarkable speed. Many of them are still standing, or at least partially so, preserved by the desert’s dryness. The bus appears to have been one of the pieces of working equipment brought into the desert during that era of mining and extraction — used perhaps as transport, perhaps as a shelter for workers — and when the industry wound down, it stayed.
The bodywork, when we reached it, was the deep, uniform orange-brown of metal that has had decades of arid desert air to do its work. The windows were long gone. The interior had silted up with fine sand. Whatever seats it once had were either absent or buried. And behind it, framing the whole scene with a kind of absurd grandeur, were the white ridges of the salt mountains and the distant, perfect cone of a volcano on the horizon. It looked, frankly, like a film set. Specifically, the kind of film set in a film that takes itself very seriously.
We all clambered about it with great enthusiasm, taking photographs from every conceivable angle, in full awareness that several thousand other visitors had taken exactly these same photographs from exactly these same angles, and feeling not the least bit self-conscious about it. There are some experiences where the fact that everyone does the same thing is precisely the point. The Spanish doctors were wonderful company for this phase of the afternoon: cheerful, silly in exactly the right way, entirely willing to adopt whatever pose the moment seemed to call for. Excellent people. I hope their patients appreciate them.
🥂 Cocktails at Sunset, Which Is Every Bit as Good as It Sounds
As the light began the long golden shift that deserts do particularly well, we were taken to a viewpoint that looked out across the salt flats and mountains with the kind of panorama that makes you feel, briefly, that you understand why people move to places like this.
The tour description had mentioned snacks and cocktails. I had read this detail with mild curiosity and mild scepticism in equal measure. In practice, it turned out to be rather better than I had expected: Pisco sours, which is the correct drink for Chile, and a Chilean red wine, along with a spread of bread and appetisers that was more than adequate. I stood at the edge of a viewpoint in the Atacama Desert with a Pisco sour in my hand and watched the light turn the salt flats pink and orange, and made a conscious decision not to feel even slightly awkward about it.
Pisco, for the record, is a grape-based spirit produced in both Chile and Peru, and the question of which country invented it is the kind of territorial dispute that both nations take with great seriousness and considerable heat. A Pisco sour is made from Pisco, fresh lemon or lime juice, egg white, sugar syrup and a dash of Angostura bitters, and it is exactly the right drink for a late afternoon in the desert. I am not usually a cocktails-before-dinner person, but some contexts make their own rules.
The drive back to San Pedro was quiet and comfortable, the last of the light fading as we came into town. I found a decent restaurant for dinner — the town has a number of them, catering to the steady flow of visitors who come to see the volcanoes, the salt flats, the geysers at El Tatio to the north, and the various other geological spectacles that the Atacama produces with some generosity. The streets were quiet and cool, the temperature having dropped sharply from the afternoon’s warmth. The adobe walls still held some of the day’s heat. The stars above San Pedro, at 2,400 metres and miles from any significant light pollution, were the kind of stars that city people — which is what I am — encounter too rarely.
🪞 Reflections
There is something slightly uncomfortable, in a useful way, about spending an afternoon in the Atacama. Not physically uncomfortable, though the altitude and the thin air do remind you that your body is operating at a slight disadvantage. What I mean is that the landscape has a quality of indifference that is very good for the ego.
The Salt Mountains formed over twenty million years. The ocean floor beneath the Llano de la Paciencia was deposited when our ancestors had not yet worked out how to be anything in particular. The saltpetre industry that brought the bus out into the desert rose and fell inside a century — a blink, geologically speaking — and left almost nothing behind except some ruins and an orange-brown vehicle in a valley. The desert absorbed all of it without comment.
For those of us who spend most of our time in cities, where everything has been arranged for human convenience and where our own concerns tend to feel pressing and immediate, there is a quiet corrective in spending a few hours somewhere that has been doing its own thing for millions of years and will continue doing it long after every building in every city has gone. I do not want to make this sound more profound than a pleasant afternoon with a couple of Spanish doctors and a Pisco sour really warrants. But it did make me think, briefly and pleasantly, about proportion.
And it was a very good afternoon. I would have missed all of it if I had stayed in bed, which, around ten o’clock that morning, had seemed like an entirely reasonable and attractive proposition. Past-me, who booked the tour, was wiser than present-me, who just wanted more coffee and possibly a second breakfast. It happens that way sometimes.
Planning Your Visit to San Pedro de Atacama
San Pedro de Atacama is one of South America’s most extraordinary destinations — a small desert town in northern Chile that serves as the gateway to some of the most dramatic landscapes on earth. Surrounded by the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert in the world, it sits at an altitude of around 2,400 metres above sea level and offers access to vast salt flats, volcanic geysers, high-altitude lagoons, lunar valleys, and skies so clear they rank among the finest stargazing locations on the planet.
📍 Location
San Pedro de Atacama lies in the Antofagasta Region of northern Chile, close to the borders of both Bolivia and Argentina. It is roughly 1,670 kilometres north of the capital, Santiago. The town itself is a compact, characterful place of adobe buildings and unpaved streets, with a pleasantly frontier-like atmosphere. At its heart is the main tourist artery, Caracoles Street, a lively four-block stretch lined with restaurants, tour agencies, bars, and shops — all within easy walking distance of one another.
Despite being a popular tourist hub, San Pedro retains a certain unhurried charm. The surrounding landscape is simply staggering: within a short drive of town you encounter the Valle de la Luna (Moon Valley), the Salar de Atacama salt flat, vivid rainbow-coloured rock formations, flamingo-dotted brine lagoons, and the El Tatio geyser field high in the Andes.
✈️ Getting There
San Pedro de Atacama has no airport of its own. The nearest is El Loa Airport (CJC) in Calama, approximately 100 kilometres to the northwest — roughly an hour and a quarter’s drive away.
By Air
Flying into Calama is by far the most practical option for most visitors. There are around ten domestic flights a day from Santiago, with a flight time of approximately two hours. Some services also connect from other Chilean cities. International travellers typically fly into Santiago first, then take a connecting domestic flight onwards to Calama.
From Calama to San Pedro
Once in Calama, there are several ways to continue the journey to San Pedro:
- Shared shuttle: The most popular choice, used by the great majority of arriving tourists. Shared minibuses depart from the airport and the fare is around 15,000 Chilean pesos (approximately £14). The journey takes around 90 minutes. Several operators serve this route, including Atacama 2000 and Transfer Atacama, and seats can be booked in advance or arranged on arrival.
- Private transfer: More expensive but convenient for groups or those arriving at odd hours. A door-to-door private transfer for up to four people costs in the region of £55–£110. When split between several travellers, this can be competitive with shuttle prices.
- Bus: Multiple bus companies — including TurBus, KTUR, Frontera del Norte, and Intertrans — operate services between Calama and San Pedro, with the journey taking roughly one and a half to two hours. Tickets cost between 3,000 and 5,000 pesos.
- Car hire: Rental cars are available at Calama airport from several companies. The roads to San Pedro are in reasonable condition, though a vehicle with good ground clearance or a 4×4 is advisable, particularly if you intend to explore beyond the main routes. Some rental companies insist on a 4×4 as a condition of hire. You will typically need a credit card for the deposit.
By Bus from Santiago
It is possible to travel directly to San Pedro from Santiago by long-distance coach, a journey of around 24 hours covering roughly 1,680 kilometres. TurBus is the main operator running this direct route. Other bus companies travel as far as Calama, from where a local connection onwards to San Pedro is required. This overland option suits those who want to see more of the country or who are travelling on a tight budget.
By Land from Argentina
San Pedro is accessible from Argentina via the Paso de Jama border crossing, around 160 kilometres to the east at an altitude of 4,200 metres. Bus services operate from Salta and San Salvador de Jujuy in Argentina’s northwest, run by companies such as Pullman Bus and Gemini, though services are not daily and the journey time is around ten hours, not counting delays at the border. This is a particularly scenic approach for those combining Chile with Argentina’s Andean northwest.
Via the Uyuni Salt Flat Tour from Bolivia
One of the most spectacular ways to arrive is on a three-day overland tour from Uyuni in Bolivia. This route crosses the border at Hito Cajón and deposits travellers directly into San Pedro, combining two of South America’s greatest natural attractions in a single journey.
🚗 Getting Around
On Foot
The town centre of San Pedro is small enough to cover entirely on foot — it spans roughly one to two kilometres in radius, and everything you need as a visitor, from accommodation and restaurants to tour offices and ATMs, is within a ten to twenty minute walk. The streets are unpaved and dusty, so comfortable, sturdy footwear is recommended.
By Bicycle
Cycling is a popular and enjoyable way to explore the immediate surroundings of San Pedro. Bikes can be hired from various agencies in town and are well suited to visits to nearby sites such as the Valle de la Luna, which lies only around 15 kilometres away.
Organised Tours
For the vast majority of attractions further afield — El Tatio (95 kilometres), the Altiplanic Lagoons (around 150 kilometres return), Piedras Rojas, and the salt flat — organised tours are both the most practical and most common way to get around. Tour operators are plentiful along Caracoles Street and all major attractions are served by group excursions with minibus transport included. Pickup is typically from your accommodation. It is generally worth shopping around in person at two or three agencies before booking, as prices are often more negotiable face to face than those advertised online.
By Car
Hiring a car gives you the greatest freedom, particularly for stopping at viewpoints and visiting sites at your own pace. However, many roads beyond the town are unpaved and some require a 4×4, particularly routes into the mountains. It is worth factoring in the condition of roads, altitude, and fuel availability before setting off independently. There are no commercial ride-sharing apps operating in this part of Chile.
Best Time to Visit San Pedro de Atacama
Perched at 2,400 metres above sea level in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert — the driest place on Earth — San Pedro de Atacama is a destination of almost unearthly beauty. Salt flats, active volcanoes, steaming geysers and ink-dark skies await, but the extreme climate demands careful timing. One constant applies all year round: temperatures swing dramatically between day and night, often by as much as 20°C. No matter when you visit, layering is not optional.
🌧️ Summer: December to February
Summer is the busiest and most expensive time to visit. Daytime temperatures climb to between 25°C and 32°C, making outdoor exploration in the early morning essential. Nights remain comparatively mild at around 10–15°C. The catch is the invierno altiplánico, or Altiplanic Winter — a phenomenon driven by moisture pushing up from the Bolivian plateau. Afternoon thunderstorms and brief downpours are possible in January and February, with cloud cover on around 40 per cent of nights. Road closures at high-altitude sites do occur, and some tours to places such as the El Tatio Geysers and the Bolivian salt flats may be disrupted. Despite this, the vivid desert light and warmth of the season make it genuinely photogenic when skies clear. Book accommodation three to four months ahead, as prices are at their peak and availability is tight.
What to pack: Lightweight, breathable clothing (linen or technical fabrics), a high-SPF sunscreen (50+), a wide-brimmed hat, UV-protection sunglasses, a compact waterproof rain jacket, sturdy closed-toe walking shoes, a mid-layer fleece for evenings, a reusable water bottle, altitude sickness tablets (consult your GP), insect repellent.
🍂 Autumn: March to May
Autumn is one of the finest times to visit San Pedro de Atacama. Temperatures moderate to a comfortable 18–24°C by day and 2–8°C by night — cool but entirely manageable. Rainfall falls sharply as the Altiplanic Winter retreats, and skies reach around 85 per cent clear. Crowds thin compared to summer, accommodation prices drop by roughly 25–30 per cent, and tours run with smaller groups. April and May in particular offer pristine conditions: crystalline air, outstanding visibility and excellent conditions for stargazing, hiking the Valle de la Luna and photographing the Salar de Atacama. High-altitude volcano climbs, such as Cerro Toco, are also well suited to this period. Autumn is arguably the best-kept secret on the Atacama calendar.
What to pack: Comfortable daytime layers (t-shirts plus a mid-weight fleece), a warmer insulating jacket for evenings, windproof outer shell, thermal base layers for dawn excursions (especially El Tatio Geysers), warm hat and gloves for early mornings, sunscreen (50+), good-quality walking boots, a reusable water bottle, altitude sickness medication.
❄️ Winter: June to August
Winter is the low season for visitors, yet it offers a singular experience: the finest stargazing conditions on the planet. Nights drop to between −5°C and −10°C in San Pedro town itself, and pre-dawn temperatures at the El Tatio Geysers (4,300 metres elevation) plummet to −20°C or below. Daytime temperatures are mild and sunny, typically 15–22°C, and skies are extraordinarily clear, with atmospheric stability that eliminates the turbulence that blurs astronomical observation at warmer times of year. Accommodation prices are at their lowest. June is the quietest month of all and offers an authentically tranquil visit. The cold at high altitude is not to be underestimated — even seasoned travellers are sometimes caught out — but for those who prepare properly, the Milky Way arching overhead above the salt flats is an experience that stays for a lifetime.
What to pack: Heavyweight thermal base layers (top and bottom), an insulating down jacket (rated to −20°C for high-altitude excursions), a windproof and waterproof outer shell, thick woollen or synthetic socks, thermal gloves and a balaclava, a warm hat, a neck gaiter, sturdy and warm walking boots, sunscreen (the desert sun is intense even in winter), UV sunglasses, a reusable water bottle (insulated to prevent freezing), altitude sickness medication.
🌸 Spring: September to November
Spring mirrors autumn in many ways and shares its status as a prime shoulder season. Temperatures build pleasantly from around 18°C to 25°C by day, with nights warming from 0°C up to 8–10°C by November. Skies are exceptionally clear — around 90 per cent cloud-free — making spring the best season for photography, with warm golden light and an increasingly vibrant desert palette. November can bring stronger winds (gusts of 20–30 km/h are possible), which may cause brief discomfort but rarely disrupt activities. September and October in particular strike an excellent balance: warm enough by day to explore in a single layer, cool enough at night to sleep comfortably, with manageable crowds and good mid-range pricing. Astronomy tours thrive through to November, and the high-mountain passes are accessible without the intensity of winter cold.
What to pack: Light daytime clothing (t-shirts, shorts or lightweight trousers), a windproof jacket (essential in October and November), a mid-layer fleece, warm layers for the evening, a hat and gloves for early morning tours, sunscreen (50+), UV sunglasses, sturdy walking shoes or boots, a reusable water bottle, altitude sickness tablets.
📊 Seasonal Summary Table
| Season | Months | Daytime Temp | Night Temp | Rainfall Risk | Crowds | Prices | Stargazing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summer | Dec–Feb | 25–32°C | 10–15°C | Moderate (Altiplanic) | Very high | High | Fair | Warmth, festivals |
| Autumn | Mar–May | 18–24°C | 2–8°C | Very low | Low–medium | Medium | Good | Balance, hiking |
| Winter | Jun–Aug | 15–22°C | −5 to −10°C | Negligible | Low | Low | Excellent | Astronomy, budget |
| Spring | Sep–Nov | 18–25°C | 0–10°C | Negligible | Medium | Medium | Very good | Photography, trekking |
🌟 Overall Best Time to Visit
For most travellers, the shoulder seasons of autumn (April–May) and spring (September–November) offer the most satisfying experience overall. The weather is settled, skies are reliably clear, temperatures are comfortable both day and night, prices are noticeably lower than the summer peak, and the major sites feel less crowded. If world-class stargazing is your primary motivation, the winter months of June to August are unrivalled — provided you come properly equipped for sub-zero nights. Summer (December to February) suits those who prefer warmth and a lively atmosphere, but the risk of Altiplanic storms at altitude and the cost and congestion of peak season should be weighed carefully. Whenever you go, the Atacama rewards preparation: pack for the full temperature range, protect yourself from the ferocious high-altitude sun, and arrive with an altitude acclimatisation plan. The desert does not change its conditions for its visitors — but for those who come prepared, it offers some of the most spectacular scenery and skies on Earth.