Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert is the driest desert on the planet, located in Chile, and which borders the Pacific Ocean in the west, Peru in the north and Argentina and Bolivia in the east. There are areas in the desert where it has never rained. Because of its dry climate, it is rich in deposits of borax, nitrate, iodine, copper, table salt.

The landscape of the desert consists of barchans, mountains, sandy and stony deserts. The plain part of the desert is almost lifeless, you can sometimes find only blue-green algae, lichens, and small cacti. Fauna is small, but coastal Pacific cliffs are home to colonies of fish-eating birds. The desert mountains, up to 6,885 meters high, have no glaciers at all. However, on May 19, 2010, an anomalous phenomenon occurred in the Atacama desert, where snow fell for the first time and several cities were flooded with snowdrifts.

The most famous tourist spot of the Atacama Desert is the Lunar Valley, where you can observe interesting landscapes similar to the surface of the moon, in the form of unique formations of salt, sand and stone, which arose under the millennial influence of water and wind. Here you can watch a delightful sunset, which surprises with its range of colors. This is where many science fiction films were shot.