Salitrera Santa Laura, Tarapaca Region, Chile

5RovingAl 5:00 PM Feb 22, 2015

DO IT IN DAYLIGHT AND THEN UNDER THE STARS
Exploring Santa Laura is great fun. I got a big kick out of it when I did it alone. First in daylight and then at night. The day part was easy. I took one of the regular inter-city buses from the Iquique market and got off just short of the access road to Santa Laura. Since I was traveling on foot, I decided that I could take some shortcuts. Up a dune, across a flat and I entered the historic grounds from above and to the right of the main entrance. No one challenged me, there were no fences and no dogs. Once inside, it is only logical that nobody paid me the least attention. Because there were no other visitors and the few staff were presumably taking their lunch break. I could explore the grounds at my own pace. The skeleton of the main building looks very impressive from the ground. But its inside is what makes it so special. Be careful and follow the basic rule - never walk in the middle of any wooden surface. I weigh well over 100 kg. and if you are not much heavier, I guess you should be all right. And do not attempt it if you have fear of heights. Mind you, I am not an adrenaline junky, and a very safety-conscious traveler. After I got the grounds covered to my satisfaction, there and then I decided to return at night. This time I didn´t mind company and bought a place with a tour operator that happened to offer a midnight visit to both the Humberstone facility and Santa Laura. Humberstone at night is a huge delight for kids. We played a game of hide-and-seek on a galactic scale. Everybody, adults including, were shrieking with sheer delight. Though at times the game got real spooky, too. Very entertaining. After that we moved over to Santa Laura. At night it is bathed in the eerie brilliance of several well-placed floodlights. After the tour that kept to the floodlit areas was over, we were offered generous drinks, tasty snacks and groovy music in the club room. When the fun got going and everybody was busy, I borrowed a powerful flashlight that was conveniently left on the hook by the door and penetrated the main ruin for the second time. Exploring it with a narrow flashlight beam was a marvelous experience. I felt like the shadows surrounding me were filled with ghosts. I knew that the place was long dead, but somehow it seemed alive, alert and...watching me. The tour got back to Iquique past 1.am. and the driver delivered everybody to their respective hotels. Final remark: Santa Laura is NOT a place where you let your children roam free. It is NOT a playground attraction. Keep children under supervision and/or control AT ALL TIMES. PS I visited in 2013, but I am reasonably certain that nothing has changed there much in the meantime

4Malcolm B 5:00 PM Jan 19, 2017

The bread and butter of Chile's past
As a chemist, I found the tour of the now decaying Santa Laura Saltpeter factory absolutely amazing. There are detailed descriptions accompanying each step of the process, from the leaching and recrystalization of the Saltpeter to the side business of iodine extraction. The scale of the process was large for the day and it was good to be able to walk in and around the impressive timber structures. The electrical generators are of British origin. I gather the original owners were British and stopped the supply of Saltpetre to Germany during the First World War, which hurt business somwhat. Our guide told us that the workers lived on-site (in the middle of the Atacama Desert) and were paid in tokens that could only be spent at the on-site shop owned by the mine manager. We were on a private tour and probably spent a good hour at this site. I imagine it would be less interesting as part of a large group, especially if your guide was unfamilar with the history. The main house is in good repair and contains a lot of memorabilia from the times. We did not visit the nearby ghost town as we were more interested in the Saltpetre extraction and purification and were restricted with time. We were driven through this site on a 14 hour road trip from Arica to San Pedro and also stopped off at Geoglyphs along the way. The whole trip was a bit of a grueling marathon and I am certain there are easier ways to access the site. The nearby city is Iquique but we did not have time to pass through it. Saltpetre was the white gold of Chile and Peru the 1800's as it was used to make explosives and fertilizers. Visiting Santa Laura is visiting the core of former European wealth generation in the Atacarma region and is essential viewing fro chemists and history enthusiasts.