January 17, 2025
IQUIQUE, CHILE - Town Square below
Today 4 of us hired an Uber driver to take us to Humberstone, a UNESCO world heritage ghost town out in the Atacama Desert. This once thriving town was built for the extraction of Saltpeter or potassium nitrate - a component of gunpowder, fertilizer and used in food preservation. Unfortunately, most of the displays were just in Spanish, but I could figure out the basic history of what went on - the employees were being taken advantage of and they had an uprising, that basically ended Humberstone. Place was huge!
Next we drove out further into the desert to see The Atacama Giant or Gigante de Atacama or the Tarapaca Giant an anthropomorphic geoglyph. It is the largest geoglyph with a human representation in the world at 390 feet. It is considered an archaeological monument and cultural heritage of Chile. It is believed to be a shaman or deity or spiritual figure. Regardless, our uber driver had never seen and he hiked with us to the desert viewing spot. A very different kind of day!
