We all know that when we travel, one of the hardest and most important parts of truly relaxing and feeling pleasure, when you are on holiday in particular, lies in the food. Trips are marked by details, by the landscape, some souvenirs, meetings and ingredients that make you a part of the place. Read…

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.

In the Prehispanic Altiplanic region, there were nutritious and varied foods, like the corn seen in the picture. Whatever grew in one place and not in another, was carried in the long journey, to be exchanged in some of the villages in the region. Hundreds of  kilometers travelled by the people who needed to aquire something that was in a place far away. One would take the seeds that would provide him with clay pots or leather goods, according to the specialty of the region.

Even if nowadays this way of shopping is not an everyday procedure! Some towns in far out regions of the Altiplano, still have this trade system, and walk for days to meet eachother and exchange goods. In the image we choose here, you can see the variety and the two greatest cultural exchange experiences: one of them the yellow corn, ancient prehispanic food and the other the pomegranate, which the spaniards brought with them and proved to addapt with enthusiasm to the sunlight desert terraces!

The picture is of a basket in a small shop in Toconao, a village in a desert oasis, near creeks where fruit trees grow making forests of lush green abundance, even if most of these fruit trees have been introduced by the people travelling the region, what really counts is that they are growing and producing fruit in the middle of the desert!

These are some of the products offered by the hotel kitchen in Alto Atacama: most of them are from the area and are produced by local growers, so the experience of eating in the desert is as harmonious and true to the place as possoible, in a balanced mixture with what the cook brings, from his worldly knowledge of high gastronomy.  In fact, when its pomegranate season, they are harvested from the hotels park and gardens and the corn from the vegetable plots that the were designed by Veronica Poblete.