🇨🇱 Chile · Far North
Calama is 'the mining capital of Chile': a city deep in the Atacama Desert that lives off copper, defined by the presence of Chuquicamata, one of the largest and most famous open-pit mines in the world. It is an oasis and a major transport hub in the middle of the desert's immensity, more than 2,200 meters up, where the day burns with sun and the night turns cold all at once.
For many travelers, Calama is above all the gateway to San Pedro de Atacama: this is where the plane lands, and from here you take the transfer to the heart of the touristic Atacama, with its geysers, salt flats, lagoons and starry skies. But the city has an interest of its own, tied above all to the epic of copper: the tour of the Chuquicamata mine and its old camp, now abandoned, is a unique way to grasp how mining shaped the Chilean north.
This guide covers the essentials of Calama with a practical eye: how to organize a visit to Chuquicamata, what to see in the city and around it, how to connect with San Pedro de Atacama and how to get around and adjust to the altitude. A key stop on any journey through Chile's Norte Grande.
The Calama area was, from pre-Hispanic times, an oasis in the Loa river basin, inhabited by Atacameño (Likanantai) peoples who farmed the valleys and formed part of the desert's caravan networks, later under the influence of the Inca Empire. In colonial times and in the early republican era, this territory belonged to Bolivia. During the War of the Pacific, in March 1879, the combat of Calama was fought here (remembered for the resistance of the Bolivian Eduardo Abaroa, a national hero in Bolivia), and the area then passed to Chilean sovereignty. Calama's great leap came in the 20th century with the industrial exploitation of Chuquicamata's copper, begun on a large scale around 1915 by US capital (the Chile Exploration Company / Anaconda) and nationalized in 1971 under the government of Salvador Allende, along with the rest of large-scale copper mining. For decades Chuquicamata was a huge mining camp with a life of its own; in time, its residents were moved to Calama, which grew into the country's main service city for copper mining. Today it is the capital of El Loa province and the great gateway to San Pedro de Atacama. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The mining heart of Chile in the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world: copper and lithium, the oasis and the skies of San Pedro de Atacama, the El Tatio geysers, the Paranal and ALMA observatories, and a history of territorial conquest at Bolivia's expense.
Read the history of Antofagasta Region →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before copper made it famous, the Calama area was already a point of life in the driest desert on earth, thanks to the Loa river. The Loa, Chile's longest river, rises in the Andes and crosses the Atacama Desert, tracing a thread of green through the dry immensity. Its waters made possible, from remote times, farming oases and human settlement in a region where otherwise living would be all but impossible.
These oases were inhabited by the Atacameño peoples, also called Likanantai (or Lican Antai), farmers and herders who grew maize, quinoa and other crops on terraces, raised llamas and formed part of the great caravan networks connecting the Pacific coast with the valleys and the Andean altiplano. Nearby villages such as Chiu Chiu and the Pukará de Lasana (a pre-Hispanic stone fortress above a ravine) bear witness to that ancient occupation of the Loa valley.
In time, the region came under the influence of the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu), which folded these oases into its road network (the Qhapaq Ñan) and its economy. Calama and its surroundings were thus a crossroads in the desert long before the Spanish arrived: a hub of exchange where the produce of the sea, the valleys and the highlands met.
With the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, the Loa region was folded into the vast colonial domain, though always as a marginal place of passage, given the harshness of the desert. The most visible trace of that era around Calama are the small colonial Andean churches, such as the Church of San Francisco de Chiu Chiu, one of the oldest in Chile, built with the traditional technique of adobe walls, cactus-wood roofs and carob beams, mixing Spanish Catholicism with Atacameño architecture and labor.
After South American independence at the start of the 19th century, this territory did not fall within Chile but became part of Bolivia. Calama was then a modest Bolivian oasis in the Atacama Desert, within the Litoral department that gave Bolivia its outlet to the sea. The region remained thinly populated, with a local farming and herding economy, still far from imagining the transformation industrial mining would bring.
Atacama's belonging to Bolivia, and the mineral wealth (saltpeter, silver and copper) hidden in its desert, were about to make this whole region —Calama included— the center of a conflict that would change the borders of South America: the War of the Pacific.
When the War of the Pacific broke out in 1879, Calama was the scene of one of its first land engagements. After the Chilean occupation of Antofagasta in February 1879, Chilean forces pushed inland to take control of the oases and the routes. On 23 March 1879 the combat of Calama was fought, in which a small group of Bolivian defenders faced Chilean troops who vastly outnumbered them.
Out of that fight emerged a central figure in Bolivian memory: Eduardo Abaroa, a civilian who, by tradition, held out to the end at the Topáter bridge and answered the call to surrender with a line that became famous in Bolivia. Abaroa died in the action and became a Bolivian national hero; 23 March, the day of the combat, is commemorated in Bolivia as the Day of the Sea, tied to its claim to an outlet to the ocean. Calama's Plaza 23 de Marzo recalls that date.
The combat of Calama was one more Chilean victory in the advance along the coast, and the region came under Chilean control. When the war ended, under the 1884 Truce Pact and, later, the definitive 1904 treaty between Chile and Bolivia, the whole of the old Bolivian coast —Calama and Antofagasta included— was incorporated into Chile, and Bolivia permanently lost its sovereign access to the sea.
Calama's destiny changed utterly in the 20th century with the industrial exploitation of copper. A few kilometers from the city lay a gigantic deposit: Chuquicamata, known and worked by hand since pre-Hispanic times, but whose true wealth could only be tapped on a grand scale with modern mining technology. Around 1915, US capital —the Chile Exploration Company, linked to the Guggenheim group and later to Anaconda Copper— began the industrial open-pit exploitation of the copper.
Chuquicamata became one of the largest copper mines in the world, a colossal pit dug into the desert. Around the works grew an enormous mining camp, the town of Chuquicamata, with thousands of residents, houses, schools, a hospital, a cinema, clubs and a life of its own: a genuine copper city built by the company. Meanwhile Calama, the nearby oasis, grew as a support and service town.
In 1971, under the government of Salvador Allende, large-scale copper mining —Chuquicamata included— was nationalized with broad political support, passing into the hands of the Chilean state through what would become Codelco, the country's largest state company. Copper established itself as 'Chile's paycheck', and Chuquicamata as one of its symbols. The copper era transformed the whole region and placed Calama at the center of the national mining economy.
For decades the Chuquicamata camp was a mining town brimming with life, where generations of copper families were born and raised. But at the start of the 21st century, for environmental reasons (pollution from the works themselves) and because of the need to expand the mine, the company decided to move the entire population of Chuquicamata to the nearby city of Calama. The relocation was completed around 2007, leaving behind a ghost town —the old abandoned camp visited on today's tours— heavy with memory and nostalgia.
Calama absorbed that population and grew into the country's main service city for copper mining, 'the mining capital of Chile'. It is a functional, thriving city with a high turnover of workers, living to the rhythm of the mine, with all the services of a mid-sized city: an airport, shops, healthcare, education and connections to the rest of the country.
In recent decades, Calama has added a key tourism role to its mining one: it is the great gateway to San Pedro de Atacama, the star destination of northern Chile. El Loa Airport receives the travelers who come for the geysers, salt flats, lagoons and starry skies of the Atacama, and from Calama they take the transfer into that universe of landscapes. So the city today combines two identities: the industrial epic of copper and its role as a springboard into one of the most fascinating deserts on the planet.