Experience the best of Calama

Calama lies in the Antofagasta Region at about 2,200 metres, an oasis city beside the Loa River, Chile's longest. It is a working town of mining families, with Chuquicamata, one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, just to the north. The Atacama around it is among the driest places on earth, and the sky is clear almost every day.

Chiu-Chiu, a small village up the Loa, has a seventeenth-century adobe church, and the ruins of the Lasana fortress show how people lived here before the Incas. San Pedro de Atacama, about 100 kilometres south-east, is the base for the Valle de la Luna, the Salar de Atacama and the El Tatio geysers, which steam at dawn at over 4,000 metres.

Northern Chilean cooking uses empanadas, grilled meats and Andean ingredients such as quinoa, potatoes and llama, and rica rica, a fragrant desert herb, flavours teas and stews. Days are sunny and dry in every season, with sharp temperature swings between noon and night. Summer brings occasional storms to the high Andes.