Tours and Activities:

The Miners’ Flower

Calama is a mining city par excellence; walking along its streets is enough to realize that it is much more than a "hotel city", like some of its miners usually refer to it.

Walking around the city, visitors immediately notice that it is pervaded with something difficult to be put into words. Calama is like the spring and Chuquicamata is like a flower and they cannot exist without each other.

Despite lying some kilometers away from one another, the great mine contains part of the treasure to be unavoidably spent at the city. However, Calama is much more than a city where miners have their families and homes, as they describe it.

The city is the administrative center of a great community that some decades ago settled down in one of the aridest and biggest deserts in the world in order to exploit copper: the Atacama Desert. It is task of the Loa River to bring the necessary water for this oasis to be the base of operations from where visitors leave on a tour to the various local attractions.

Luxury in Arid Lands

In the Ramirez pedestrian promenade, a beautiful sculpture of a miner working on reddish stone stands out. Around it, an endless number of historic-cultural stores and buildings are distributed along its almost five blocks of length.

Ramírez Promenade features many important sites, like the 23 de marzo square, where various generations of the city gather at any time; from the youngest dwellers, willing to see the last trends of local craftsmen (piercing, tattoos, dreadlocks, T-shirts and braids) to the eldest citizens, who dive into the newspapers that come from Santiago de Chile every day.

Gratitude and Prayers

Saint John the Baptist’s Cathedral houses an elegant ceiling made of copper which was donated by Codelco, the industry responsible for the exploitation of copper in Chile.

Every day women -mostly miners’ mothers and wives- attend church, not only to show gratitude, but also to ask for divine protection for all those who work in the mines.

Perhaps these Calama codes make this place stand out from the rest of Chile. Here, copper is the distinguished dweller, along with its sons, the miner’s families, those in charge of making the days alike in this incredible desert city. Because, even though I have not mentioned it before, Calama means “sprout” in the native tongue. Ancestors were far from wrong when they chose that name.

See also: Hotels in Calama and other accommodation venues