What happens when you have a gardening project and your soil is purely sand with very little access to water? You make the best of the situation, you look around and decide to follow what already grows in the area, both the native species and the introduced stuff.

This is a little of the basics you´ll get when you walk the park at the Hotel grounds. The landscape designer: Verónica Poblete, has alot of experience in areas where no one dares to plant a thing and she has come up with a design system called: Andean Scape. Together with her husband she is also able to irrigate complex areas and turn anywhere into a garden.

One of the plants that struck me in her design was the alfalfa (Medicago sativa). As a young farmer in England it is a crop I treasured, both as fodder for the animals and for its sweet summer scent and green glow. The idea came to Verónica as part of the gesture in the garden to have a green patch on site, one that had the flow of alfalfa in the breeze and as you sit at your table for dinner on the terrace, you are inmersed in the lush sway of this noble plant.

Link: Alfalfa (via Wikipedia)

What happens as you drive through the desert is constantly amazing.
Hours of your eyes becomming more and more sensitive and in tune with the tones and textures of the land -in a landscape that at first glance honestly seems quite similar all the time-  hours of  coloured sands, when in the middle of it all, the green, lush green. Total fertility and abundance, agriculture and gardens.

This happens all along the deserts in the North of Chile, in Peru and in Bolivia. What happens is simple: time and erosion bring the nutrients and minerals down from the hills and into the valleys. So all it takes is for a bit of water to make it all blossom. The gift of the underground waters that pop up in Atacama or the rivers that flow in thin strips down from the melting snow of the Andes.

As we have mentioned before in other posts, Alto Atacama hotel has many of these small sacle growers as providers of food for the guests. All orgainic, small scale agriculture and traditional ingredients too, such as quinoa, corn and the delicious purple potato. The particularity of growing in the valleys is different to the terrace system, for you only need to make use of the running water as it passes, without much land shifting.

As you are driving through th infinite sandscapes of the desert, with its colours and the surrounding mountains, you come upon a true oasis! A place of water, gardening terraces, trees, and fertile soil: Socaire. This is a place where food grows in abundnace and you get the famous colourful potatoes, some dark purple, some two-toned and others slightly pink.

The terraces are a system that the Incas came up with and are still used by the altiplanic people, to make the best of the water and the soil´s fertility, for this way you get the least erosion.

As part of a series of documentaries about the desert, the hotel has filmed these places to make them more accesible to a broad audience. Socaire is now registered in one of these and in the picture we chose you can see the wonderful moment of harvest, the honour of taking these goods from the earth.

Just like the fruit that we introduced yesterday, the hotel kitchen is mixed with the harmony that these ingredients can provide in a good gastronomy. In more than one opportunity, you will be able to try these delicacies on your plate and will now know their origin.

The atacameños (atacama people) as they are called in the North of Chile or the atacamas, as the North of Argentina reffers to them, are the native indigenous group of the Atacama Desert. Their original name is lickan-antay, which means “the inhabitants of the territory” and their native tongue, kunza, is an extinct tongue, however some of the words used coloquially today- and even though they are thought to be quechua- are actualy  some sort of kunza slang.

The atacama people live between the South of Bolivia and the North of Chile and Argentina, and as such are the true desert dwellers and today have mostly mixed with the criollos, or spanish descendants, so in strict terms they are not extinct, as you will sometimes find is said.

For centuries they have been growing food in the driest lands on Earth, making good use of the scarce water supplies and farming with the renowned terrace system. Their livestock being the llama and alpaca, which they have used for their meat, wool and to carry load.

The original foods they lived on are included in the menu of  Alto Atacama Hotel and consist on a generouus variety of some produce like: pumpkins and squash, peppers, beans, prickly pear, corn, potato and quinua, they also grew tobacco in their terrace systems.

When you come to visit us, you can also learn more about these fascinating people at the P. R. Le Paige Museum, which has the most complete collection you could find about the atacameños´ history and arqueology.