La Serena
The next major town north from Santiago is La Serena. It’s known for being in the border zone with the desert area in the north of Chile. It’s also the disputed capital of Pisco production, the liquor used in pisco sours and other drinks (Peru also claims Pisco as theirs).
My first stop was the Humboldt Penguin National Park. If you go, be sure to ask some questions because it turned out we went during their nesting season, when they climb up to some cliffs to protect their eggs from predators…so there wasn’t much to see.

Next I headed to Pisco Elqui, the main town in the pisco growing area. This is basically desert, but they grow the grapes using irrigation. Pisco Elqui has a winery you can tour for a fee, a restaurant, and a tranquil little plaza but not much else.

From La Serena you can head partway into the valley, near the town of Vicuña, for star-gazing. The Atacama desert has 330 couldless nights a year, so this region is packed with scientific observatories as well as a number of observatories that cater to tourists. Sadly, I happened to be there on one of the 30 cloudy nights so there was no opportunity to see the stars. I had also hoped to visit one of the worlds largest scientific observatories, either Observatorio Tololo or Observatorio Paranal, which have tours on the weekends, but it seems it’s necessary to make arrangements a month in advance. There’s no opportunity to actually see the stars at these observatories, in fact the telescopes are so powerful they’re mostly just hooked up to computers. But these facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and I always like to see impressive looking feats of engineering like that.
La Serena was a nice enough place to stop, but I think easy to skip as well.



