The Most Beautiful Places in Antofagasta
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Antofagasta are Licancabur, Atacama Large Millimeter Array and Laguna Miscanti. The list covers 8 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Antofagasta region holds the heart of the Atacama, the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Cold ocean currents keep rain away from the coast, the Andes block it from the east, and the high altiplano rises to volcanoes over five thousand metres. The result is salt flats, geyser fields and blue lagoons under some of the clearest and darkest skies anywhere, which is why the world's astronomers have come here as well.
Licancabur, a near-perfect volcanic cone on the border with Bolivia, keeps a small lake in its summit crater. Laguna Miscanti lies deep blue beneath the slopes of Miñiques, and the Salar de Tara spreads its white crust between rock towers on the high plateau. At El Tatio, one of the largest geyser fields in the Southern Hemisphere, columns of steam rise at dawn more than four thousand metres above sea level.
Near San Pedro de Atacama, the Valle de la Luna is a maze of salt-crusted ridges and dunes. On the Chajnantor plateau, the antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array scan the sky, and on Cerro Paranal the Very Large Telescope crowns a desert summit. On the Pan-American Highway, Mario Irarrázabal's Mano del Desierto reaches out of the sand.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Licancabur | Volcano | |
| 2 | Atacama Large Millimeter Array | Radio telescope | |
| 3 | Laguna Miscanti | Lake | |
| 4 | Paranal Observatory | Observatory | |
| 5 | El Tatio | Geyser | |
| 6 | Valle de la Luna, Atacama | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Mano del Desierto | Sculpture | |
| 8 | Salar de Tara | Salt flat |
01 Licancabur
Volcán Licancabur
Chile22.834° S 67.883° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Licancabur is the volcano that closes the eastern horizon of San Pedro de Atacama: a near-perfect cone of 5,916 metres standing exactly on the border between Chile and Bolivia, dark against a sky that is almost always cloudless. Its symmetry is what makes it so compelling.
Did you know? Scientists study the lake as a stand-in for ancient lakes on Mars, and in 2006 a NASA-supported team led by Nathalie Cabrol made scuba dives in it at record altitude.
02 Atacama Large Millimeter Array
Chile23.019° S 67.753° W
Iztok Bončina/ESO · CC BY 4.0 High on the Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Atacama, some 5,000 metres above sea level, sixty-six white dishes stand in a landscape of ochre dust and bare volcanoes.
Did you know? Each large antenna weighs about 115 tonnes, and the German-built transporters that carry them have driver seats designed to take an oxygen tank.
03 Laguna Miscanti
Chile23.725° S 67.765° W
Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0 High on the Chilean Altiplano, at about 4,140 metres, Laguna Miscanti is a sheet of water so intensely blue that it looks painted onto the land. Its shape is often compared to an arrowhead, with a small peninsula pushing in from the north, and it lies in an open basin of ochre volcanic slopes.
Did you know? With about 5 grams of salt per litre, Miscanti is the least salty of all the lakes in its region.
04 Paranal Observatory
Observatorio Paranal
Chile24.627° S 70.404° W
European Southern Observatory · CC BY 4.0 Cerro Paranal is a bare summit 2,635 metres high in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and on its levelled top the European Southern Observatory has built its flagship observatory.
Did you know? In 2004 the VLT photographed 2M1207b, a planet-mass companion of a young brown dwarf, widely hailed as the first direct image of an exoplanet.
05 El Tatio
Chile22.331° S 68.010° W
Image by michellebranco11 from Pixabay El Tatio is a field of geysers and boiling springs on a high Andean plain in northern Chile, 4,320 metres above sea level, beneath a line of volcanoes that marks the border with Bolivia.
Did you know? Italian engineers from Larderello, the cradle of geothermal power, first probed the field for energy in 1921 and 1922.
06 Valle de la Luna, Atacama
Valle de la Luna
Chile22.911° S 68.323° W
Image by rumpelstilzken from Pixabay Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon, lies in the Cordillera de la Sal just west of San Pedro de Atacama, in one of the driest deserts on Earth.
Did you know? The only life found in the soil so far is bacteria living a few millimetres inside translucent salt, shielded there from intense ultraviolet light.
07 Mano del Desierto
Chile24.158° S 70.157° W
Marcos Escalier from Antofagasta, Chile. · CC BY-SA 2.0 Sixty-odd kilometres of empty road south of Antofagasta, in the Atacama Desert, a giant left hand breaks up through the gravel, fingers spread, as if someone buried under the plain were reaching for air.
Did you know? He trained in West Germany under the sculptor Waldemar Otto, whose figurative expressionism shaped the long limbs and awkward poses typical of his figures.
08 Salar de Tara
Chile23.017° S 67.300° W
Carlos Urzua · CC BY 2.0 Salar de Tara lies at about 4,300 metres in the high puna of Chile's Atacama region, close to where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia meet.
Did you know? La Pacana's eruption around 4 million years ago produced the Atana ignimbrite, one of the largest explosive eruptions known on Earth.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Antofagasta?
- On our list, Licancabur ranks first, followed by Atacama Large Millimeter Array and Laguna Miscanti.
- Why is the Atacama Desert so dry?
- The Atacama sits between two rain shadows: the Andes block moist air from the Amazon to the east, and the cold Humboldt Current off the coast stops Pacific clouds from producing rain. Some weather stations there have recorded almost no rainfall at all.
- Why are so many observatories in the Atacama?
- The high, dry plateau has very little cloud and water vapour, low light pollution and stable air, which gives some of the best observing conditions on Earth. That is why the Very Large Telescope at Paranal and ALMA on Chajnantor were built here.
- When is the best time to see the El Tatio geysers?
- The geysers are best seen at sunrise, when the cold morning air makes the steam columns most visible against the sky.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Antofagasta?
- In our collection, the places in Antofagasta are most often rock formations (1), volcanoes (1), geysers (1) and lakes (1).
- How many places are on this list in Antofagasta?
- The list covers 8 places.