This is the stylish way to see one of the world's greatest deserts

Times

20-05-2025

'Do you like rollercoasters?' inquired my long-haired, rocker-style Chilean guide with a grin as we turned off the tarmac and on to a rock-littered track across the Valley of Patience. 'Because for the next half hour it's going to feel like one — so hold on.'
My heart was already thundering after a day's hike at 3,300m in the cold, oxygen-depleted Andean air outside the town of San Pedro de Atacama. By the time we'd careered over the compacted ash, wound through vertiginous orange cliffs and then gingerly manoeuvred down a rocky, 45-degree slope, I had begun to badly need the glass of Chilean carménère that Sebastian del Campo had been promising.
But reward came when, just around the corner, he suddenly stopped the car. Our jaws dropped in amazement. Before us lay a panorama of the Atacama desert in all its sunset-bathed glory: the snowcapped, volcano-tipped silhouettes of the Andes glowing burgundy and purple; the sky above awash with pastel yellows, pinks and apricots; the rising full moon's soft beams shimmering over the parched crusty skin of the earth. Wherever we looked, the scars of our ravaged planet were plain to see in the celestial light. Parallel lines of giant orange turrets, eroded into fantastical shapes, rose like an army of spiny-backed dinosaurs across the plains. Horizontal layers of squashed white gypsum crystals sparkled across cliffs. Rounded, wind-scoured hillsides rolled in waves.
For a few minutes we just stood there, poleaxed by the splendour. Then, as darkness descended, Del Campo came to his senses. 'We'd better come back to earth,' he said, shaking his head in wonderment. 'We still have to climb down to camp — ideally before dark.'
This wasn't a camp as most of us know it. The site, on the banks of the San Pedro river, 20 miles outside the town, was a temporary one, chosen specifically for me as a fun add-on because I was en route to the Tierra Atacama hotel in nearby San Pedro, which has just been redesigned and relaunched. But its tents could be set up pretty much anywhere to suit a bespoke traveller's itinerary, according to Ivan Costa, the founder of Glove Travel. He conceived the idea of a roaming place to stay in seven years ago, so that luxury travellers could 'get in touch more with nature and have the experience of being on their own, in silence, in the desert'.
When, five minutes later, we came to a stop and I looked down into a canyon, I couldn't quite believe where I was about to sleep. Below steep cliffs, on a wide riverbed, sat two tiny white bell tents: my bedroom and my bathroom. To the right a fire had been lit beside two pouffes: my bar. And along a path a string of solar lamps had been planted next to a dining table. Other than those, there was nothing around but desert and sky. 'Don't worry, you won't be totally alone,' Del Campo said by way of assurance. 'My tent is round that corner and you'll have a radio.'
After a tour of my accommodation — the bedroom cosily floored in Andean rugs; the wood-slatted bathroom fitted with a compostable WC, basin and gas-heated shower — we settled at the campfire, where a feast had been laid out by the charming local chef Leonelo Cuevas. As I happily sipped carménère, Cuevas delivered Chilean treat after treat: first olives, guacamole, quinoa crispbreads, purple crisps, cured local meats and cheeses; then soft slow-cooked beef with four varieties of coloured Andean potatoes; and finally a caramel-like mousse made from the syrup of a local fruit, chañar. If I hadn't been dead on my feet and almost comatose with carbs, Cuevas would have apparently also serenaded me with his guitar.
Instead, following a surprisingly hot shower, I reclothed myself in every layer I'd brought and, after another besotted gaze at the thick, sparkling, almost-purple whirls of the Milky Way, I climbed into my big double bed. Although it was about 2C outside, in bed I felt as cosseted as Rapunzel, sandwiched between a thick mattress-topper and heavy blankets, duvet and llama-wool throws. Lulled by the comforting trickle of the nearby San Pedro River — and smiling as I tried to imagine my position in this giant desert not far from Chile's borders with Bolivia and Argentina — I passed out.
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I could have stayed for days, breakfasting on espresso and dulce de leche-filled croissants from the acclaimed La Franchuteria bakery in San Pedro, but I had an appointment with one of the town's smartest hotels. In 2008 the Tierra Atacama was one of the first hotels designed to welcome luxury travellers in the Atacama desert. When it reopened in March, following a two-year, $20 million renovation, it had become the smartest.
The Tierra Atacama has always been stylish. The founding owner Miguel Purcell, architect Matias González and interior designer Carolina Delpiano are well known for their sensitive collaborations, which combine the landscape, vernacular architectural styles and endemic crafts. But since Tierra was sold in 2022 to the Australian Baillie Lodges company (which itself had gone into partnership with the American KSL Capital Partners in 2019), the hotel has fixed its eyes on the ultra-luxury international market. Hence the transformation of eight rooms into four suites, the addition of an alluring wine wall and outdoor 'fire kitchen', and the expansion of its spa and gym.
Although it is now more polished, the hotel's old spirit remains. Thanks to Delpiano, the four new suites are beautifully understated, their floors lined with local pitted, creamy travertine, and their walls clad in Chilean woods or painted the dark blue of the night sky. Chairs are adorned with Andean llama wool throws and there are photographs of Andean festivals by Andrés Figueroa and giant astral-inspired installations by Maria Edwards. Then there are the expansive patios on which to sit and gaze at the Andes.
That is, if you're ever in your room. Each suite comes with its own private car and guide for excursions. That's possibly the greatest treat of all as you can dictate your route and your stop-offs. So every day, armed with a picnic lunch and binoculars, I went out with the enthusiastic 34-year-old Patagonian guide Carolina Wilson.
In a desert that's more than 1,000km long and, at 105,000 sq km, about half the size of Britain, getting anywhere takes hours. In two days we could squeeze in just four key spots. One day it was Rainbow Valley (a multicoloured array of mineral-rich mountains), followed by a rock face carved with petroglyphs and then the white, mineral-encrusted salt flats, home to flamingos. And the next day, after exploring a high-altitude area punctured by boiling pools and spouting geysers, we hiked in a canyon, stopping to admire a wild black llama, herds of golden vicuña, a pair of viscacha (like a shortsighted fat rabbit with a long tail) and, rather thrillingly, a cave littered with still-bloody bones: remnants of a puma's dinner.
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Mainly, though, I soaked up Wilson's knowledge about the area's fauna and geology, learning to distinguish volcanic lava from meteorite, compacted ash from clay, copper residue from sulphur. I clocked up a list of my favourite Atacama plants: the llareta, which creeps over boulders like a luminous green carpet; the single-stemmed cardon cactus, used to make church roofs; and the 'mother-in-law's-cactus', a pincushion of spikes that glint wickedly in the sunlight.
In between, Wilson and I talked about everything from the terrifying dictatorship of the 1970s and the landmines that still litter the desert to the devastating impact of lithium mining that is drying wetlands and the vast copper mines polluting entire towns. And as we drove through the world's driest desert, we discussed water.
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This is an area that gets only about 30 to 40mm of rain a year, mainly in February, so life depends almost entirely on snowmelt from the Andes. In fact, so precious is water in Chile that it's owned by the local communities across the country; in San Pedro, the community sells it by the hour from irrigation channels that crisscross the town. All potable water has to be bought in big plastic bottles.
The Tierra Atacama hotel gets eight hours of community water every 20 days, much of which is wasted because the hotel has no storage tanks, and also pumps from a salty supply 42m underground. It needs every drop it can lay its hands on because every suite comes with not only an indoor shower but an outdoor one too, as well as a pool and a deep bathtub.
The spa is equally aqua-centric. Alongside a steam room, there's a pool with hydro-massage jets (which often don't work because the speed of evaporation is so fast that the water level keeps dropping), a Jacuzzi and a pretty outdoor pool, whose towels (rather hilariously) are accompanied by a note asking you to reuse them to save 'limited resources'.
When staff are so friendly (the young ones giving me kisses in the morning as if I was a favoured maiden aunt), when the design is so thoughtful and when the chef is clearly trying to incorporate local ingredients into menus (not always successfully), it feels ungracious to bang on about water. But when communities to the east are now unable to grow crops in increasingly dry soils, when village streams have dried up because lithium mines are diverting water south, when even flamingos are migrating to Bolivia to find new pans, I felt guilty even dipping a toe in the communal pool, never mind my own.
In such a rapidly changing world, there must surely be smarter alternatives to therapies that use water. After all, the desert is littered with pumice stones, minerals, muds and salts. Just as animals and plants are having to adapt, perhaps it's time for hotels to do so too. Especially almost-perfect ones like Tierra.Lisa Grainger was a guest of Audley Private Concierge, which has eight nights' full-board from £15,200pp, including four at Tierra Atacama (three in a suite and one glamping), one in Santiago, a city tour, two at a luxury wine hotel in the Apalta Valley, business class flights and transfers (audleytravel.com/apc)