3 Days in Chile’s Atacama Desert: Spiritual Lagoons, Silent Dunes & Soulful Stargazing

The day begins in the cool half-light of San Pedro, when the dust hasn’t yet risen and the adobe walls still hold the night’s chill. You wander toward the Plaza de San Pedro de Atacama, where the old trees throw serious shade and the only sounds are church bells and the low murmur of locals on benches. After a slow morning orbiting this little square – the heart of every first-timer’s guide to the Atacama – lunch is a short walk away, in a courtyard where the food actually tastes of the desert rather than a generic traveller’s menu. By early afternoon, the light sharpens and you trade town for the flat, white glare of the salt lagoons at Cejar and Piedra, where the water holds you up like a secret. Skin tight with salt, you head back to shower off the desert and dress for a deliberately lingering dinner in a small dining room where the wine list is as considered as the plates. Night falls fast here; by evening you’re bundled in a puffer, breath visible, listening to an astronomer decode the southern sky in a quiet field outside town. Tomorrow will go deeper into water and silence, but tonight is about that first jolt of scale: how small you feel under this kind of sky, and how oddly comforting that is.

The second morning smells of coffee and warm bread rather than dust. You wake slower, body starting to understand the altitude, and drift toward a café where the clatter of cups and the crackle of baguettes in the oven feel almost indecent in this desert. From there, you trade town for color: Valle del Arcoiris, where the hills stack in rust, green and chalky white, like someone left geology samples out in the sun. The ground under your boots is powdery and dry, and the only sounds are wind and your own footsteps. Lunch pulls you back toward San Pedro, where a low-key comedor dishes out plates that taste homemade and generous. The afternoon is all about water again, but this time it’s heat, not salt: Puritama’s series of high-altitude pools linked by wooden walkways, steam curling into dry air, mineral-rich water wrapping around tired muscles. The smell of wet rock and vegetation is almost shocking after so much dust. Evening folds into a relaxed dinner in town – grilled salmon, quinoa, a glass of Chilean red – and then another kind of stargazing, this time at Observatorio Hemisferio Sur, where the telescopes are bigger and the explanations go deeper. If last night was an introduction, tonight is a quiet conversation with the cosmos. Tomorrow, you’ll go lunar and saline, but this day is about color, water and the slow un-knotting of your shoulders.

By day three, the desert has slowed your internal metronome. Morning is gentle: a café on Caracoles where the espresso is strong, the pastries flaky, and the soundtrack is low enough that you can still hear the scrape of chairs on tile. You wander through town, then head out late morning toward the lunar ridges west of San Pedro. Lunch is unfussy and local, the kind of place where the smell of grilled meat and sopaipillas hits you before you even see the sign. Afternoon belongs to water and salt again, but in a different register: Laguna Tebinquiche, where the surface is so calm it throws back the Andes like a mirror. Walking along the salt-encrusted shore, you hear the crunch underfoot and nothing else, the air sharp with minerals and sun. As the day cools, you trade shorts for long sleeves and drive to Mirador de Kari – Piedra del Coyote, a ledge that feels like the edge of a different planet, to watch the Valle de la Luna slip from gold to mauve. Dinner back in town is at a courtyard-restaurant-bar hybrid, lanterns swinging slightly in the desert breeze, plates and cocktails arriving in no particular hurry. If you stay up late enough, you can almost feel the town exhale as tours end and generators hum down. Tomorrow you’ll leave, but tonight the desert feels less like a place you visited and more like a frequency you’ve briefly tuned into.