Off to Humberstone ghost town

We woke up at 8:30 am and had breakfast at the cafeteria. By the time we finished breakfast and had a shower and packed, it was already 11 am. We went straight to Humberstone. There was a movie shoot going on near the entrance.

Humberstone is a former mining town in the Atacama Desert, a few hundred kilometres from Chile's borders with Peru and Bolivia.
It was named after James Humberstone, a British chemical engineer who emigrated to South America in 1875.
He made his fortune from saltpetre, which was dug out of caliche - the nitrate-rich crust of the desert - and used to make fertilizer.
For a while in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, almost all the saltpetre in the world came from the Atacama Desert. It was known as "white gold" and was in huge demand in the industrialising countries of Europe, which needed fertilizer to help grow food for their rapidly expanding populations.
Founded in 1872, it was originally known as La Palma and in its heyday was home to around 3,500 people.
When World War One broke out, the British blockaded exports of saltpetre to Germany.
That prompted the Germans to look for alternatives, and they invented synthetic substitutes that could be used to make fertilizer. Suddenly, no-one needed Chilean nitrate anymore and the industry collapsed.
These days, Humberstone is a ghost town. No-one has lived or worked here for half a century. But in the dry desert air it has been well preserved. You can still see the old company store where the workers bought their food and provisions. Humberstone is now a United Nations World Heritage Site.

It was 11:30 by now. We saw there was a guide tour at 12:30 pm. It would be in Spanish but still better than no explanation at all. Instead of wasting time here, we decided to go to its twin ghost town Santa Laura. This is where the extracted saltpeter used to be processed. There is no guided tour here and it is much smaller than Humberstone. The entrance to this place is also included in the ticket. We decided to spend an hour here and then come back before the tour start.Read more