Northern Chile is home to salty flats, steamy springs—and a bucolic spa set in the shadow of an active volcano. Liesl Schillinger takes in the thrill and the chill.
An hour after dawn in Chile’s northern desert, bundled against the early-morning cold in a down jacket, alpaca gloves, knit hat, and llama-sprigged scarf, I stood amid the rock-ringed El Tatio geysers—more than 14,000 feet above sea level, higher than Pikes Peak—watching plumes of geothermal spray burst from the moonscape. They steamed and hissed as they met the 20° Fahrenheit air, casting an otherworldly mist before dissolving into the vast azure sky against the awe-inspiring backdrop of the Andes Mountains. With me were a handful of other hardy guests from Tierra Atacama, the desert hotel and spa in the northern Chilean town of San Pedro de Atacama where you don’t passively receive your pampering, you earn it by hiking up dunes and scaling volcanoes, crawling through salt-cave labyrinths or clambering through river gorges. Here, fourteen hours from New York, the pleasures of spa relaxation commingle with the adrenaline rush of outdoor adventure—and the satisfaction of believing you’ve deserved your decadent downtime.
We had forgone the luxury of sleeping late in order to take the long predawn van ride to the sensational natural wonder, which must be seen first thing in the morning, while the temperature is below freezing, to show the geysers’ vapor. For an hour we walked on the stony earth’s surface, twining among the paths between the geysers, stomping our feet to keep warm, and snapping photographs—exclaiming when we spotted a vicuña on a grassy slope, or a rhea (an emu-like Andean bird) mincing across a dried-up river bed. As we ate a hearty breakfast of yogurt, cheeses, sliced meats, fresh fruit, and avocado, with cocoa as a treat, the geyser display vanished in the warming air and we piled back into the van, heading about 55 miles south and, before long, gaining 55 degrees of heat.
Our stay at Tierra Atacama is replete with appetizing choices. We begin each day by perusing three packed, enticing menus—one for a host of nearby excursions, one for the spa, and another for the marvelous on-site restaurant (studded with sin gluten options)—which allows guests to cherry-pick their adventures and their cosseting cures. The hotel itself exudes austere, ranchero simplicity, with a Cubist aesthetic that evokes late Cézanne. Built around a centuries-old cattle enclosure, where Argentine herds paused for refreshment after crossing the Andes and continuing on to the Pacific, it enfolds a rectangular compound of low, angular villas of red-stained wood, each with a terrace and a woven sunroof, enclosed by adobe walls. The landscape architect, Chile’s Teresa Moller, preserved many of the corral’s original walls, as well as the indigenous algarrobo and chañar trees—crinkle-leaved and green-limbed—whose fruit is transformed by the on-site chef, Francisco Valencia, into a delicate ice cream that tastes of maple and mochi. The rooms echo their terrestrial surroundings—large, spare, and airy, with walls and floors bearing touches of locally sourced stone and wood, textiles in desert hues, and cowhide rugs that evoke gaucho allure. I also appreciated the non-Chilean amenities of a powerful shower stocked with L’Occitane.
Since May 2015, the property has been run by a solicitous Englishman named Nicholas Russ, who has lived in Chile for fourteen years but is sensitive to the differing expectations of guests from many lands. Russ was far too discreet to specify, but one of my guides explained helpfully that Brazilian guests sometimes arrive in high heels and like to be driven to mountaintops rather than scale them themselves, whereas gung-ho Americans and Europeans prefer to sweat for their spa treatments with challenging expeditions. Guilty as charged. Each hike or climb I embarked on came with a different lively, informed, multilingual guide; but I stuck with one therapist, Yeymi, for all my spa treatments. In between my excursiones—or, as the guides’ pronunciation seemed to shorten it to my foreign ear, ’scursiones—Yeymi gently and expertly plied my skin with unguents, and we gossiped about love, children, and optimism. After sporty, slender Krasna led me and a group to the dune-peaked Moon Valley and the Mirador de Kari overlook onto the red-rock Valley of Death, guiding us across fields of metamorphic rock that jingled underfoot like wind chimes, Yeymi spoiled me with a salt scrub and a clay body mask, giving me the energy to rush off with the next vanload and see the flamingos. After knowledgeable young Pancho herded me and another group up two-and-a-half scree-filled miles along the rocky Guatin river gorge to the Puritama Hot Springs, Yeymi massaged my back with stones slicked with almond oil and essence of violet, and rebooted my chakras with native crystals for good measure. Revived, I undertook another ’scursión, scampering like a mountain goat up the volcanic ridges of the Domeyko Range, then following the mellow and friendly Thalia down the sinuous, chocolate-brown paths of the Devil’s Gorge. Yeymi bookended my stay with two soothing facials—the first to rejuvenate, the other to hydrate. “Creo que nací para hacer eso,” she confided as she massaged cool balm across my temples: “I believe I was born to do this.” I believe she was right; by the end of the week, we were taking selfies with each other.
And yet my most transporting spa moment occurred in the last two hours of my stay, when I unwound after the geysers with a solitary soak in a plein air hot tub in the hotel’s rosemary garden. Basking in the bright sun under a roof of brea branches, I lolled in skin-smoothing goat’s milk flecked with lavender and mint, admiring the snapdragons that frisked beyond the tub’s round rim and the Licancabur volcano that loomed in the distance. Leaning against the bath’s smooth pine walls, my knees rising like islands from a milk-white sea, I reached for a goblet of iced herbal tea, speared a ripe strawberry from a plate, and felt like Cleopatra enjoying her daily dairy immersion. Even though I was entirely alone, it may have been the most romantic experience of my life. The spa manager, Marcela Ortega, told me that couples often reserve Tierra Atacama’s secluded hot-tub niche at sunset for marriage proposals—with champagne instead of tea. She smiled at recalling one such candlelit engagement. “Me emocionó,” she said. It moved her; me, too.
I admit, I was primed to react strongly to Chile. The country has held a romantic fascination for me ever since it captured my attention in the first year of the millennium, when I acquired a tall, serene, horse-riding Chilean-Danish boyfriend. A nature-loving businessman from Santiago, he taught me Spanish by accident but steeped me in the magic of his nation’s treasures intentionally. Though not talkative, he liked to recite poems by Neruda. Once, seized by patriotic fervor, he made me laugh by belting out the country’s anthem, “Puro, Chile.” Before meeting this Chileno, however, whenever I heard the word Chile, I’d thought of Pinochet, Portillo, and Patagonia. But he showed me photographs of his national terrain that I half-doubted were real: flamingos flocking at salty pools; stark peaks—terra cotta, gray, or white—rising from parched earth like the plates on a stegosaurus’s back; cactus-spiked cliffs; rushing cataracts. After we (amicably) parted ways, whenever I heard his country mentioned, I thought only: Where were those flamingos, and where was that Tatooine topography—and would I ever get to see them, now that we’d said adios?
Then chance took me to the Atacama Desert, the mystical habitat that had so beguiled me. The driest non-polar spot on the globe, high and clear-skied, it has gorges, canyons, dunes, and salt flats that stretch taut beneath the Andean altiplano. Atacama has long been popular with vigorous South Americans and backpackers, who like to rough it or stay in modest hotels and hostels, scaling rugged crags, hiking up volcanoes and dunes, and soothing their muscles in mountaintop mineral springs. Lately, however, it has lured farther-flung admirers: astronomers from many continents, who have thronged here since the early aughts, when an international consortium of scientists began building the billion-dollar ALMA observatory, whose radio telescope rises three miles above sea level and produces images ten times clearer than the Hubble’s. A constellation of boutique hotels and spas soon landed in the nearby town of San Pedro, serving the new influx of discerning travelers who come here in search of matchless vistas and authenticity in their spa treatments—salt, stones, crystals, and mud, drawn from Chile’s mineral resources and repurposed as scrubs, talismans, and balms to exfoliate, soothe, purify, and invigorate.
For me, another distinctive delight of the experience was the variety and sociability of my fellow thrill-and-chill-seekers. In my myriad overland journeys at Tierra Atacama, I met authors, bankers, flight controllers, and lawyers from New York, Boston, Mallorca, and São Paulo; some in their 20s, some in their 60s, all of them animated and alive to sensation. At meals in the hotel’s lodgelike restaurant and common room, at the fire pits on the terraces, or stargazing at night on the deck of the small observatory next door, picking out Orion and Gemini in the Southern Hemisphere, my companions and I bonded and shared stories like characters caught up in the same dream.
On a spa bed one afternoon, recharging after the morning’s ’scursión, I pondered the fulfilling blend I had found here of exertion and relaxation, delectably entwined. As Yeymi applied heated lava rocks—red and black and white—to my back, sensing just where to press to relieve my tingling muscles, I decided I preferred rocks on me to me on rocks. And yet, in the Atacama Desert, you wouldn’t want one without the other.
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