chile

Chilean writer/director Patricio Guzmán’s 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light provides a dramatic introduction to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, located between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. The film surveys astronomers interrogating origins of the cosmos, archeological evidence, and the heartbreaking unearthing of bone fragments of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s murdered victims, their bodies discarded in the desert. The highest desert in the world, averaging over 8200 feet and the driest nonpolar desert in the world, Atacama all but defies description. Even having seen Nostalgia for the Light before my recent visit, nothing prepared me for the week I spent experiencing its diverse ecosystems and historical richness.