San Pedro de Atacama is a small and wonderful pre-Andean village that seems frozen in time. Here, the ancestral customs of the Atacameño people still survive: their traditional dances and celebrations, their adobe buildings that have remained unchanged for millennia, and their agro-pastoral rituals associated with water, the mountains, and Pachamama (Mother Earth). This area was settled thousands of years ago by one of the 11 original ethnic groups of what is now Chile, first in the Calama oasis around 12,000 years ago, and gradually establishing themselves in the pre-Andean foothills that provided them with water and biodiversity for their survival. Over the centuries, different groups settled along the eastern slope of the Atacama basin, facing the marvelous "Licancabur volcano" or "Tata Lickancho," as the Atacameños call it, the tutelary mountain of the people, recognized as "a mallku," a protector and provider of well-being for his people.

 

In this wonderfully privileged environment, the first settlers of the San Pedro de Atacama oasis took advantage of the waters of the two surface rivers that arrive from the mountain range to the northeast area of the Atacama basin, its biodiversity, its variety of shrubs, trees, its fruits and its wood, all generated thanks to those waters that come down from the great mountain range of the Andes as a result of the melting snow and the scarce seasonal rainfall.
This ancestral culture, considered one of the two living original cultures of Chile by Dr. Agustín Llagostera, has existed for thousands of years in this desert in an autonomous and sustainable way, since long before the first European colonizers arrived in America. Despite attempts over the centuries by foreign cultures to transform it, it has largely remained frozen in time. Time has shown that the "Atacameño culture" or "Lickanantay" is a consequence of its geographical environment, an ancestral way of subsistence, its interaction with the mountain range, the water that flows down from it, the desert, the biodiversity, and the Andean cultures and cosmovisions of Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina with which it has interacted for thousands of years.