Tarapacá

Iquique's setting is one of the most striking of any Chilean coastal city — a strip of high-rises and beaches squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and a near-vertical wall of desert sand, the Cerro Dragón dune rising more than 500 metres directly behind the city. Sandboarding down Cerro Dragón, with the city and ocean spread out below, is a genuinely unusual urban adventure available nowhere else in Chile, and operators rent boards or run guided descents. Along the clifftop above the city, tandem paragliding flights are popular, riding thermals along the coast for views over Iquique's beaches and dunes. The city's Cavancha and Brava beaches draw swimmers and surfers, with a lively boardwalk and restaurant scene. In the historic centre, wooden Georgian-style mansions and the restored Teatro Municipal recall Iquique's boom decades as the world's leading nitrate-export port, a wealth visible in architecture that feels unexpectedly grand for a desert city.

A short drive inland from Iquique, the twin nitrate-mining towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura sit abandoned in the desert, preserved by the region's extreme dryness into one of the world's most evocative industrial ghost towns and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From the late 19th century, Chile's nitrate fields here supplied much of the world's fertiliser and explosives, drawing thousands of workers to purpose-built company towns with housing, a market, a theatre, a swimming pool built from a repurposed ship's hull, and hulking processing machinery — until the invention of synthetic nitrate collapsed the industry and the towns emptied within a generation. Walking through Humberstone's rusting machinery, faded shopfronts and empty theatre seats is a uniquely atmospheric window into a boom-and-bust chapter of Chilean history, with information panels explaining the site's industrial processes and the workers' daily lives. It rewards a half-day trip from Iquique, ideally in the cooler morning hours.

Deep in the Atacama's northern reaches, Pica is a startling green oasis town, its streets lined with citrus orchards fed by underground springs in the midst of one of the driest landscapes on earth. The town is famous throughout Chile for its limes — the key ingredient in a proper pisco sour — and for other citrus and mango grown in its microclimate, sold at roadside stands and in the town's small market. The natural thermal pool of Cocha Resbaladero, a spring-fed swimming hole set among palms at a constant, pleasantly warm temperature, is the town's main attraction, popular with day-trippers from Iquique. Nearby, ancient geoglyphs etched into desert hillsides and the ruins of pre-Columbian settlements point to the long history of oases like Pica along old trade routes across the Atacama. It makes a rewarding full-day trip from Iquique, combined with Humberstone en route.