Visit of Humberstone & Santa Laura ghost towns

Finally we are waking up after 6 am ! We are slowing synching ourselves with the local time. 

We have breakfast in the common room before preparing our picnic for the day. Time to drive back to the desert to visit the towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura. These two ghost towns are testament to the Gigantic past Nitrate business and mining in Chile.

I didn’t have much expectations – how interesting could be an empty town? Ends up being VERY interesting! There wasn’t a lot of people and we ended up being and feeling alone in an actual ghost town in the middle of the desert. It’s like a post-apocalyptic movie set or game. Where were my zombies ?

Apart from this eerie feeling when you visit, it’s fascinating to see the way people used to live there –explanations are aplenty. You can visit all the urban side of this town, the industrial and old tools and factory too. I didn’t know anything about Nitrate, iodin and its use. Chile had 65% of the world export until Nitrate was synthetized. Entire towns in the desert were build for the production. When we drove from Calama, we saw many ruins along the road with the signs like “Ex-Officina of xxx ”. All these ruins were old nitrate mining towns!

Honestly when you learn about the living conditions, it’s chilling. It was modern day slavery. It’s interesting to see the parallels about what we learned at Denniston in New-Zealand (where the cold was the harsh factor ) and Atacama where it’s the heat that makes people suffer. How mining in general is grueling business no matter what you actually mine. And that entire towns that were still housing thousands of people can disappear so fast! The moment the mine close, everything just collapses.

We were fascinated by what we saw. We spend a good 4 to 5hrs walking through the town of Humberstone ( which is huge ) and then around Santa Laura for another 1h. While Humberstone has a lot more urban setting and is better maintained, I liked that Santa Laura industrial buildings were totally different and almost entirely whole. I think both complement each other.

I saw that people completely skipped Santa Laura, we were alone there. The town is a little further away via a dust road. It’s marked but not so well.

We then drove back to the hostel. While I write these lines, Alexis is playing pool with the other guests. We are taking it slow for the rest of the evening. We have diner in the common room before meeting the other guests at the next door Italian restaurant for some wines and chit chat.