The Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert has some of the highest, driest and clearest skies anywhere on the planet, and is home to more than two thirds of the world's most advanced observatories. There's simply no better place for astrotourism.

The observatories on the outskirts of San Pedro reveal the true beauty of the night sky. Experienced guides give a tour from the solar system and the Milky Way to deep space nebulas, and teach you how to capture them on camera. Seeing the rings of Saturn and its moons with your own eyes for the first time is a truly exciting and humbling experience.

Even casual stargazers shouldn't forget to look up at night in the Atacama: the celestial show is always amazing.

If you climb up from the desert plains surrounding San Pedro, the landscape suddenly changes to one of rocky gorges and canyons filled with streams and rivers flush with the snowmelt of the Andes, and dotted with the tallest and grandest cactus on the planet. It's perfect hiking country.

The Cascaca Escondida (Hidden Waterfall) is one of our favourite Atacama hikes, in which you navigate through the steep-sided Guatin Canyon with some easy riverside rock scrambling, to reach a gorgeous waterfall where you can swim. The area is home to the Cardon Cactus, which grows just a few centimetres a year – the tallest are over 7m tall and many centuries old. Guatin's microclimate also makes it also a great place for birdwatching.

San Pedro is a great place for mountain bike tours, cycling through some truly alien landscapes and wild geological formations.

The Devil’s Throat route (Garganta del Diablo) is an easy three hour mountain bike ride that takes you through rust-red hill country and along the San Pedro River, before reaching the narrow winding walls of the Devil’s Throat Canyon. At the end of the canyon, you can hike to a viewpoint for sweeping views of a parched and epic landscape, before returning to the green oasis of the town.

While the ride is suitable for all levels of fitness, the exact routes can be altered to increase the level of challenge for more experienced riders.

The Atacama's salt mountains are one of its most distinctive natural features, and give rise to landscapes that feel like another planet. By far the best places to experience them are Vallecito and Moon Valley, both close to San Pedro. 

You won't be the only ones to wonder if alien life might be lurking here: NASA comes here to test equipment for its Mars missions, while the Stars Wars team filmed parts of The Mandalorian in the area.

This region is a historic salt mining area and its detritus can still be found here: look out for the abandoned miners' bus artfully bleached and rusting near the abandoned mine on the way to Vallecito.

If looking at the stars in the Atacama is like staring into deep cosmic time, visiting El Tatio Geysers leaves you feeling like a witness to the birth of the planet itself. Over 70 geysers announce themselves with steamy explosions, while a hundred fumaroles (vents) let their volcanic gasses hiss out from deep below the earth. This impressive geological show is one of undoubted highlights of any Atacama visit.

It's a full day excursion to prepare well for. El Tatio is around 4300 m (14,100 feet) above sea level so you'll need to acclimatise, while the freezing high altitude means you'll want to wrap up warmly. Most visits arrive pre-dawn, when the contrast between the sub-zero air and the super-heated steams offers the most dramatic spectacle.

The high altitude Uyuni salt flats (Salar de Uyuni) lie just over the border in Bolivia, an overnight trip away from San Pedro. Stretching for 12,106 square km (4,674 square miles), they’re the largest salt flats in the world, stretching and shimmering in an almost impossible whiteness to the farthest horizon.

Uyuni is a place tinged with surrealism: the landscape itself seems to defy perspective, and strange mirages are commonplace. Nothing seems to exist here except the white of the ground and the piercing blue of the sky.

Visits here include a night at a salt hotel, built with rock salt hewn from the plain, an eerily rusting train cemetery and Incahuasi Island, an oasis of giant cacti erupting from the white plains.

The Reserva Nacional Los Flamencos offers visitors a richly-feathered demonstration of the Atacama's incredible biodiversity.

The main lagoon visited on a day trip from San Pedro is Laguna Chaca. This is the best place for the flamingos, where Chilean, Andean and James's flamingos all sift the briny waters here for shrimp. Wading birds such as plovers and avocets also make up this extraordinary saltwater ecosystem, and guanacos are frequently seen on the plains.

Trips here sometimes visit Toconao, a small town inhabited by the Atacameño people, where you can buy locally made woolly socks, hats and gloves. 

Although the Atacama stretches over 1000 km (620 miles) between the Pacific Coast and the Andean Mountains, you don't have to range so far to check out its major attractions. Instead, the oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama is the ideal perfect place to base yourself.

Swoop has access to a wide choice of accommodation in San Pedro, ranging from elegant boutique hotels and charming guesthouses to luxury lodges with their own guides to help you plan each day's excursions into the desert. 

The Atacama's main gateway is Calama's El Loa Airport (code CJC), which has  daily flights to Santiago (two hours). The airport is 100 km (62 miles) from the hub town of San Pedro – roughly one hour by private transfer, on a road dominated by the stunning Licancabur Volcano. 

By road, it's just over 1550 km (965 miles) from Calama to Santiago, or about 22 hours by sleeper bus. 

For Argentina, there are direct buses from San Pedro to Salta (480 km/300 miles, ten hours). 

For Bolivia, there are direct buses on the rugged high altitude backroads to Uyuni (450 km/280 miles, ten hours). It's a route strictly for the adventurous.