Indigenous Experience

The area of the basin of the Atacama Salt Flat is established as an “Area of Indigenous Development”. Here resides the atacameñan (or Lickan-Antai) culture – an indigenous culture more than 12.000 years old – which recently has been recognized by the Chilean state as an ethnos or “pueblo originario” (name collectively used for indigenous communities in America). It is a folk that still conserves traditions and customs from this era. Their language, Kunza, sadly has gone lost, and today remain barely a few words, most of which are associated to the names of places.

Being in San Pedro de Atacama, the cradle of the atacameñan culture and its centre of development, it is indispensable to approach this millennial heritage. Travelling through the silent sceneries of the Atacama desert and finding ourselves in the middle of this defiantly dry and impressively solemn place, one can´t help but think about these men and women who, for centuries, moved through these lands with their animal caravans; who had to survive by hunt and the recollection of wild fruit; who quarried stones with dogged and infinite patience to fabricate tools for survival; and who finally conquered this land and dominated it. It is impossible to not imagine a mysterious past that appears in the rocks painted by the hands of men whose spirits still seem to whisper with the whistling of the wind, as if they were longing to tell stories about ceremonies and immemorial rituals. Today, their descendants show us something that will settle within ourselves, maybe an experience or a thinking that we should assimilate from the ones that live in the desert and its hamlets today; an experience that we can take with us in our memory forever.
It is for that reason that we integrate indigenous and community tourism into our concept in the form of an experience to get an impression of the daily life and the occupations that characterize the life in the desert and the promontory. This allows us to understand the importance and challenges of agriculture, cattle breeding, alimentation or ancient medicine of the local culture. As part of this experience we visit other villages in the surroundings and/or “ayllus”* that form San Pedro de Atacama: Vilama, Larache, Sequitor, Tulor, Solcor, Quitor, Coyo, Beter, Yaye, Poconche, Cúcuter, Checar, Solor, Catarpe.

*Ayllu is the name given to old social units of the Lickan-Antai or Atacameño culture where several families lived together in agro-pastoral communities created by lineage and descendants.

SEE LESS