There is little life in the vast Atacama desert.
In the north of Chile, the area stretches over 41,000 square miles.
Its extreme climate means that little can survive there, but over the years many have tried.
The deserts are rich in copper, so there were a number of mining towns there over the years – however they have since been abandoned.
For those wishing to travel there, you’ll see few locals, but it makes for a thrilling tourist attraction.
Throughout the towns, there are yellow tsunami ‘hazard zone’ signs, and not a person in sight.
In the 1960s, the mines were abandoned, and occupied by a number of homeless people.
One of the most popular of the desolate towns was once Santa Laura, which was formed in 1872, and at its height, almost 900 people called it home.
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Remnants of the life they once lived still remain, from railway stations to train carriages.
The town is very preserved, and looks almost as though the locals just up and left a couple of weeks prior, rather than decades.
Humberstone, which lies just a couple of kilometres away, is another large ghost town, where many of the workers’ homes have been turned into museums.
The architecture of these Humberstone buildings is Art Deco, making you feel perhaps as though you are in a small American town, rather than in the middle of a desert.
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Humberstone even has a theatre – which tour guides insist is haunted by those before.
Visitors have reportedly heard voices, unexplained knocks, and doors banging whilst in the barren town.
In La Noria, the oldest ghost town in Northern Chile, there is a huge unsettling cemetery.
If you walk through, you can see human bones, as almost all of the graves are ‘open graves’, which have been ravaged by grave robbers.
If you’re ready to brave the Atacama desert, there are no direct flights there from abroad, however if you change in Santiago you can make your way onwards to a nearby city, and then book a car.
The desert has an ‘eternal spring’, the temperatures rarely change all year round and its most popular time to visit is in the winter months.
On average, temperatures reach around 22 degrees, with the coldest month to visit being July – when it is 20 degrees.
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