Arica, the capital city of Chile's Region I, is only 56 km/35 miles from the northern border of this 4,300 km/2,666 mile long sliver of land. Here, a large Chilean flag flies proudly over the El Morro fortress on a tall bluff rising dramatically out of the Pacific Ocean to a height of 150 m. It was the site of the deciding battle of the War of the Pacific (1879-84). Chile, victorious, took land formerly belonging to Peru and Bolivia, thus making Bolivia a landlocked country.
Arica is in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest in the world. (Our local guide said that he has never seen rain.) The slopes of the Azapa Valley are bare of any vegetation at all. However, looking beyond the city spreading out below El Morro we see agricultural development in the valley bottom, made possible by irrigation using water coming down from the Andes. Ancient civilizations, too, used Andean water to grow their crops. They left us a set of geoglyphs, rock figures laid out on the dry slopes. Their success waxed and waned with the variations in rainfall of the El Niño cycle, which continues to dominate life in this amazing region.
