Back Tracking... The Nitrate Ghost Towns of the Aticama

On our way to San Pedro we stopped at the Chilean national monument of Chacabuco. It was a nitrate mining town built in 1924. The turn of the century created a nitrate "white gold" mining boom in portions of Northern Chile in the Atacama. Due to inhospitable nature of the Atacama the towns were built as self sustaining villages with everything inside the outer walls. The village was only operational for 14 years before synthetic nitrate was invented in Germany and put most of the mines in the Atacama out of business. At its peak the enclosed village housed over 7,000 people within it’s walls. It had playing field, a store, a swimming pool and tennis courts within the same walls as the nitrate refining facility. It produced both liquid iodine and powdered nitrate in very large quantities. After the late 1930’s the town and facilities were abandoned until Chacabuco became a concentration camp during the Pinochet regime in 1973. To this day, it remains surrounded by approximately 98 lost landmines, left by the Chilean military when Chacabuco was used as a prison camp.