Thousands of foreign travellers visit the geysers, salt flats, oases and volcanoes of north Chile’s Atacama Desert. It is located on the Pacific coast of South America, in the north of the country.
Stretching over a 1,600-kilometre-long strip of land west of the Andes Mountains, it covers an area of 105,000 km². This increases to 128,000 km² if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. The Atacama is the world’s non-polar driest desert. It is also the second overall driest in the world.
It is here that travellers will find the starkly beautiful ghost town of Humberstone.
The town became one of the centres for saltpetre mining in Chile and was named after the British chemical engineer James Humberstone, who emigrated to South America in 1875.
For a while, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, almost all the saltpetre in the world came from the Atacama Desert.
It was known as “white gold” and was in huge demand in the industrialising countries of Europe, which needed fertiliser to help grow food for their fast-expanding populations.
Founded in 1872, Humberstone was originally known as La Palma and, in its heyday, was home to around 3,500 people.
The mines were eventually abandoned in the 1960s and were occupied by homeless people.
Rubbish, graffiti and the mummified bodies of dead dogs littered the deserted town, which was bought by a businessman who wanted to sell off the remains for scrap.
However, he went bust, and the town was taken over by a non-profit organisation which cleaned it up, before it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2005.
Humberstone is arranged in a 10-by-6-block grid. Many buildings were made of Douglas fir with zinc roofs. Verandas and covered walkways provided relief from the sun.
Today visitors can still see the old company store where the workers bought their food and provisions.
In the central square, there is a bandstand and cinema that provided them with their entertainment.
Nearby are the remains of a hotel and swimming pool. British-made heavy machinery is littered across the site.