Where is the land of eventoed ungulates? Where is the driest place on earth?

The Atacama Desert is that place – and I am sure by now you will have a concept of its whereabouts following the incredible escape of the Chilean miners... but what else? The long, long land – the strip of a country on the Pacific side of South America .. vast panoramic distances and mining ... anything else?

The Atacama is probably the driest place on Earth, and is virtually sterile because it is blocked from moisture by the eastern longitudinal Andes, and the western Chilean Coastal Range. Because of its high altitude, near non-existent cloud cover, dry air, lack of light pollution and radio interference from the very widely spaced cities, this Desert is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations – to see the skies in all their glory.

A desert is a place that will not support human habitation, though most deserts usually have oases, and the Atacama is no different; a river rising in wetter regions may traverse a desert, as the Nile does through Egypt, but the fundamental physical condition of an arid area is that it contributes nothing directly to the oceanic waters.

These oases have been populated since pre-Columbian times by the Native American nomadic hunters, who followed herds of wild camelids, for thousands of years, before settling into a sedentary culture around three – four thousand years ago; these “Atacamenos” then developed an economy based mainly on llama breeding and maize agriculture, but who were also noted for the construction of fortified towns called ‘pucaras’.

The camelids, eventoed ungulates, include both types of camel (Dromedaries and Bactrian), llamas, alpacas, vicunas etc, and fall into the same classification as pigs, peccaries, hippos, cattle, goats, antelope and others.

Camelid feet lack functional hooves, the toe bones being embedded in a broad cutaneous pad

This sparsely populated land, whose coastal cities originated from the 16th centuries – the time of the Spanish Empire, of navigation and exploration, the time of ocean sailing ships, the demand for deposits of silver, gold, copper and other minerals before the discovery of huge fertilizer deposits of sodium nitrates in the late 1700s - so valuable to agricultural growth in Europe.

In one of these oases, in the middle of the desert, at a height of about 2,000 metres (7,000 feet), lies the village of San Pedro de Atacama - pictured above, whose church was built by the Spanish in 1577.

The Atacama Desert again became a great source of wealth from the 1950s with the global demand for copper. This is the terrain and landscape that the rescued Chilean miners inhabit. Their mine was a deep copper and gold mine – which ‘weeped’ a lot – the miners’ expression for falling rocks and the sounds of creaking, that they knew warned of trouble.

That mine was a century-old one, located off a dirt track in the bare hills in northern Chile, which was worked the old-fashioned way. Miners explosively blasting chunks of gold-laden rock, the fractured rock rubble collected into trucks, transported back to the surface via the long mining tunnels, before being processed at a plant in nearby Copiapo.

The northern part of Chile in yellow, showing the Atacama Desert in red

However as we know the earth’s crust provides other riches, which over time have been mined to benefit man and his gods. The skies open our eyes to the heavens above, to the galaxies beyond ours, we have advanced mining plants, observatories with the latest telescopes ...

... but these lands of the eventoed ungulates offer something to the desperate, a place to garner a living, in terrible circumstances ... where they do not have a choice, they need to earn .. those miners will probably be alright – let us hope somehow their fellow Chilean (at least) miners have better opportunites.


... and where on the periphery old habits die hard and desperate people will do anything for a small wage – perhaps not even a living one. A harsh place with harsh consequences – but where, for those 33 miners, lady luck was with them; where further north, sadly in similar conditions, 4 Ecuadorian miners lost their lives. Let us hope the world becomes fairer ... humanity does not need this type of poverty.

Dear Mr Postman ... my mother has been partly awake this week, but enjoying knowing that she has had many cards and love from friends and relatives and from all of you around the world .. thank you for commenting, your birthday wishes and hugs – she does so appreciate your thoughts.

Hilary Melton-Butcher
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