The Andes highlands town of San Pedro de Atacama, in the northern region of Antofagasta, is the main tourist destination in Chile. It receives more than one and a half million tourists a year, while the local residents are struggling to turn it into a sustainable municipality. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile , Sep 22 2015 (IPS)

Chile’s altiplano or high plateau region, pounded by the sun of the Atacama desert, the driest place in the world, is home to dozens of indigenous communities struggling for subsistence by means of sustainable tourism initiatives that are not always that far removed from out-of-control capitalism.

“Here, money talks,” Víctor Arque, a tourist guide in San Pedro de Atacama, told Tierramérica. “If you don’t have money, no one’s interested in you.”

San Pedro de Atacama, the capital of tourism, archaeology and astronomy in northern Chile, is home to 4,800 people, 61 percent of whom belong to the Atacameño indigenous group, who refer to themselves as Lickantay in their Kunza tongue.

But during tourist season, hundreds of thousands of visitors come through the town, especially people from other countries drawn by the mysteries of the desert, its volcanoes and geysers.“All planning or studies indicating how we can do better and raise awareness of what we have and what is happening in the ecosystem are valuable.” -- Sandra Berna

The desert also offers some of the clearest night skies on the planet, and in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array or ALMA Observatory, scientists are working to decipher enigmas of the night sky.

This small highlands town, located at 2,600 metres above sea level and 1,700 km north of Santiago, received over 1.6 million visitors from Chile and abroad in 2014, according to National Tourism Service statistics.

Tourists are awed by the stunning, unique landscape of salt flats, dunes, rock formations, geysers, thermal waters, crystal clear blue lagoons, canyons and snow-capped mountains.

In fact San Pedro de Atacama, in the northern region of Antofagasta, has become the leading Chilean destination for foreign tourists.

But there is well-founded concern in some sectors that the uncontrolled flood of tourists in the area will damage the diverse ecosystems in the municipality of San Pedro de Atacama, which covers 23,439 sq km.

The municipal authorities, together with the regional government, have launched several initiatives aimed at ensuring sustainable development.

One was the Project on Ecosystem Services (ProEcoServ), financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The project was extended to 2014, with 1.5 million dollars in financing. It consisted of generating tools for the assessment and economic valuation of ecosystem services.

In May a group of local residents completed a training in renewable alternative energies that could help solve the municipality’s electricity problems.

In July, 14 hotels, hostels and restaurants received the “Clean Production Agreement” certification, which foments environmentally friendly practices such as sustainable management of solid waste and efficient water and energy use.

Dawn at the El Tatio geyser field in the northern Chilean region of Antofagasta, visited by some 100,000 tourists a year. The geyser field is administered by two indigenous communities that were granted a concession for 30 years. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

“All planning or studies indicating how we can do better and raise awareness of what we have and what is happening in the ecosystem are valuable,” San Pedro de Atacama Mayor Sandra Berna told Tierramérica.

“I would like people to be more aware, to understand what science and studies say about our ecosystem,” she said.

Despite the progress made, the small centre of the town is packed with businesses offering tours to the main local attractions.

And in the wee morning hours on any given day in tourist season you can see a long line of headlights of cars winding their way up to the El Tatio geysers, one of the principal tourist attractions in the area, which receives an average of 100,000 visits a year.

El Tatio, which in the Kunza language means “grandfather who cries”, is a field of 80 geysers located at 4,200 metres above sea level, 97 km from San Pedro de Atacama.

It is the largest geyser field in the southern hemisphere and the third largest in the world, following Yellowstone in the United States and Dolina Giezerov in Russia.

Since September 2014, this natural marvel has been administered by the indigenous communities of the highlands villages of Toconce and Caspana, through a 30-year “free use concession” granted by the government of President Michelle Bachelet.

Tourists from Chile and abroad pay an entrance fee to visit El Tatio. But in addition, leaders of the local indigenous communities charge nearly 1,000 dollars for an interview with the press.

“That’s because this is then published around the world, and it’s you people who earn the profits,” the mayor of the village of Caspana, Ernesto Colimar, told Tierramérica.

Chiu Chiu, a town 38 km from Calama, in Chile’s northern highlands, depends on subsistence farming and tourism for a living. The main attraction is the San Francisco church, a national monument. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Contrite, Luisa Terán, an Atacameño Indian from the same village, hastily clarified that this was an isolated case.

“There are people here who are mad about money, but not all of us are like that,” said Terán, who along with her cousin attended a course in India to become a “barefoot solar engineer” and installed the first solar panels in Caspana. “Most of us work hard for a living and try to protect our community,” she told Tierramérica.

The majority of the highlands villagers in Chile are family farmers who grow their own food and raise llamas, vicuñas and guanacos.

In communities like Caspana, 114 km from San Pedro de Atacama, local residents still use pre-Hispanic farming techniques, such as terraces.

Others, like the town of Chiu Chiu, have more limited tourist attractions, like the local church, although it was left nearly in ruins by the 2007 earthquake that hit Antofagasta.

Along the road between El Tatio and San Pedro is found Machuca. Although it is nearly a ghost town, it is an obligatory stop for tour guides.

Located 4,000 metres above sea level, in the hamlet of 20 houses there is one church, the main attraction for tourists, who buy traditional llama meat “anticuchos” or kebabs and goat cheese “empanadas” or hand pies.

The village has only a handful of residents, and is kept alive to receive tourists. Members of the families who used to live here take turns coming up to attend the visitors.

Only the buildings and landscape can be photographed: to take pictures of the members of the community, you have to pay.

“All of us want tourists to come, of course; you tell me what community wouldn’t want that, if it means more investment and if it means people could come back,” Terán said.

“Our peoples are almost destined to disappear, because every year dozens of families go to the cities so their children can study, or for work, so this would help us survive,” she added.

But “no one wants their town to become what San Pedro de Atacama is now, because that is the other extreme,” she said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Esperanza copper mine. Credit: Courtesy of David Pasten

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Aug 8 2013 (IPS)

The arid climate in northern Chile has forced mining companies to seek out new sources of water. The main source is seawater from the Pacific Ocean, whose use is expected to increase significantly in the coming decade despite the high costs of extraction and transport.

The vast northern region of Chile encompasses the Atacama Desert, one of the most arid spots on the planet. It is also home to the world’s biggest copper reserves, the main source of revenue in this South American nation with 6,435 kilometres of Pacific coastline.

“In arid and semi-arid regions, where the availability of water is very limited, the ocean is an alternative for industrial processes and other uses,” Luis Cisternas of the Centre of Scientific and Technological Research for Mining told Tierramérica*.

According to figures from the Chilean Mining Council, 12,615 litres per second of freshwater were used for copper extraction in 2011 – the same year that a World Bank report warned of a considerable decline in the availability of surface water in Chile.

“The use of seawater is not only a solution for the mining companies, but also a way of freeing up freshwater for other uses and allowing the restoration of damaged ecosystems,” said Cisternas, a professor at the University of Antofagasta.

While the mining industry has used seawater in different parts of the world for many years, in Chile there are only a few isolated cases, usually on the part of small or medium-sized companies that deal with minerals whose extraction is not affected by the salinity of the water, he explained.

The first big mining company to use seawater in Chile was Minera Esperanza, a joint venture between Antofagasta Minerals and the Marubeni Corporation.

The company’s copper mine uses untreated seawater, transported through a 145-kilometre-long pipeline, in all of its processes. Seawater currently accounts for 30 percent of all of the water is utilises.

The state-owned National Copper Corporation of Chile (CODELCO) will use seawater for the first time to exploit the sulphide reserves of the Radomiro Tomic mine, in one of the structural projects the company is implementing to extend the useful life of a number of its mines.

“In the case of the Radomiro Tomic (RT) Sulphides project, the use of seawater means that pressure will not be placed on the freshwater resources of the Andes Mountains or other inland surface water reserves, in an area where no new water resources are available,” a CODELCO corporate source told Tierramérica.

The RT Sulphides project represents a new line of copper concentrate production, which involves greater consumption of water per ton of copper produced than the mine’s current exploitation of oxide ore.

“The use of desalinated seawater will make it possible to extend the useful life of the mine without increasing consumption of water from the mountains,” added the source.

For its operations, RT Sulphides will extract seawater and desalinate it through reverse osmosis, a process that uses pressure to force water through a membrane which retains the dissolved solids.

The treated water will be transported to the mine’s facilities, located 3,000 metres above sea level, through a pipeline stretching 160 kilometres. The operation will entail an expenditure of 2.6 dollars per cubic metre, according to CODELCO.

According to studies, the costs associated with a seawater supply system can represent around 20 to 30 percent of the total costs of a project located more than 150 kilometres from the coast and between 3,000 and 4,000 metres above sea level.

“This means it will be necessary to find more efficient ways of supplying seawater to mining companies,” said Cisternas.

The ideal approach, he said, “is to use untreated seawater, because desalination requires energy and causes harmful effects for the environment, but this cannot always be done.”

“It will be necessary to find a way to produce water of different qualities from seawater, since different technologies and minerals require different types of water,” he added.

For CODELCO, desalinated seawater “is not a harmless solution, because it implies greater energy consumption both for its treatment and, above all, for moving it through the pipeline to where the mines are located.”

“It is also not economically viable for projects with narrower profit margins, or for projects that do not have a guaranteed energy supply,” explained the CODELCO source.

Moreover, even if safeguards are adopted, the installation of desalination plants also generates impacts on the coastline and the marine environment.

Samuel Leiva, the campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Chile, warned of the potential long-term environmental impact of the desalination process.

Desalination plants require energy in a region where there is no water, “so the alternative is to implement projects that use fossil fuels and increase atmospheric emissions and cause environmental damage all along the coast” by releasing higher-temperature water back into the ocean, he told Tierramérica.

According to Chilean water utility Aguas Antofagasta, the use of desalination technology dates back to 2003 with the entry into operation of the Antofogasta Desalination Plant, aimed at providing part of the water supply for the population.

There are currently 14 projects of this kind underway in the country, 11 of them connected to the mining sector.

In late July, Minera Escondida announced plans to invest 3.43 billion dollars in the construction of Chile’s biggest desalination plant.

By 2022, an estimated 10 billion dollars will have been invested by the private sector in 16 new seawater treatment plants.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.