Astronomical Route

Our trip starts at eight o’clock in the morning, when we leave behind the typical  morning coastal mist or “Camanchaca” as we know it in La Serena, and move towards the sunny Elqui Valley, to know one of the most important heritages of our region: one of the clearest skies in the world.

First we’ll know the most famous scientific observatory in Chile: Tololo. This is the first important observatory ever built in our country. The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) is located about 500km north of Santiago, Chile, about 70km east of La Serena, at an altitude of 2200 meters. CTIO operates the 4-m Blanco telescope on Cerro Tololo, and the new 4.1-m SOAR Telescope, which is on the adjacent Cerro Pachon, next to the 8-m Gemini Telescope.

After our visit to Tololo we’ll go to luch to the Solar Cooker restaurant, located in the city of Vicuña, the biggest city of the valley. The owners of this “solar restaurant”, two women from a small village called Villaseca, are convinced of the social and environmental benefits involved in this kind of cooking, and they will prove it to you making delicious meals using only the energy from the sun. The village is the only place in Chile where virtually all residents cook with solar power

Later, we’ll travel along the principal villages of Elqui Valley: Pisco and Montegrande, a colourful zone full of green wineyards with which people make Pisco, the most typical Chilean drink.

The end of our tour, at dusk, will be the visit to a touristic observatory, where we’ll get fascinated with one of the best places in the word for astronomical observation. There will be specialist tour guides that will give you a lecture which lasts 15 to 20 minutes approximately. In this lecture it is introduced many aspects of classic astronomy (concepts, images, research results, etc)

When the lecture finishes, tour follows with an observation outdoors (in terraces), where you can appreciate the wonders of the sky at a glance. This way we can observe the Milky Way, constellations, cumulus, nebulae, planets, blue, red stars etc, we can also observe these objects and other through different telescopes, whose diameters vary between 20 to 40cms. Return hour depends on the shift of the observation.

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