Valle de la Luna, Atacama
Valle de la Luna
Interesting facts
- The highest point of the Cordillera de la Sal, Cerro el Mármol at 2,659 metres, rises at the western end of the valley.
- More than 50 salt caves riddle the range, some over 2 km long, nearly all carved within the last 6,000 years by rare desert downpours.
- The soil here holds about 0.004 per cent moisture and 0.03 per cent organic matter, among the most lifeless ground on Earth.
- The only life found in the soil so far is bacteria living a few millimetres inside translucent salt, shielded there from intense ultraviolet light.
- Gypsum towers up to ten metres tall stand in lines along fractures and are thought to be still growing as groundwater evaporates beneath them.
- Evaporation here can outstrip rainfall by up to 500 times, and the range receives some of the strongest solar radiation measured anywhere.
- Archaeologists have identified 17 small salt quarries in the range, worked by hand in the first half of the 20th century.
- In the mid-1990s a rumour spread in Chile that Pink Floyd would play a concert here with the Chilean band Los Jaivas; it never happened.
- Day and night temperatures in the salt range can differ by 20 to 30 °C, as the dry, thin air holds almost no heat after sunset.
Why it is worth it
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. It is a landscape of salt and clay rather than solid rock: crests of crumpled, crusted ridges, sheer walls streaked with white mineral, wind-carved pinnacles and a broad dune of pale sand, all set against the chain of volcanoes along the Andes, with the near-perfect cone of Licancabur on the eastern horizon.
The salt range itself was born when movements of the Earth's crust pushed up and folded ancient lake and sea deposits, layers of salt, gypsum and clay that now stand on edge for about a hundred kilometres. In a climate where rain is extremely rare, wind and the occasional flood have worked these soft layers into strange forms. White salt crusts on the ground look like frost or snow, and some of the ridges are cut by narrow canyons and caves.
A few formations have names. The Amphitheatre is a curved wall of rock, clay and salt about 40 metres high in the middle of the valley. The Tres Marías, three eroded figures that local imagination sees as women at prayer, are the work of roughly a million years of erosion. The Gran Duna, the great dune, is the classic place to climb for sunset, when the light runs from gold through pink to violet across the ridges and then the volcanoes. The terrain is so bare and so dry that scientists have tested a prototype Mars rover here.
The valley was declared a nature sanctuary in 1982 and is part of the Los Flamencos National Reserve. It is best seen slowly: by bicycle or on foot along the marked trails in the afternoon, ending on a high viewpoint as the shadows lengthen.
Getting there
The valley is about 13 km west of San Pedro de Atacama, roughly 15 minutes by car or around 40 minutes by bicycle. Calama, the nearest city, is about 80 km away, and El Loa Airport (CJC) at Calama is the usual gateway, about 100 km by road from San Pedro; shuttles connect the airport with San Pedro. Many visitors come on guided afternoon tours from San Pedro.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Valle de la Luna is located 13 kilometres (8 mi) west of San Pedro de Atacama, in the north of Chile in the Cordillera de la Sal, in the Atacama Desert.
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