Bahía Inglesa

The bay takes its name from a visit by the English privateer Edward Davis and his ship in 1687, after which it was known as the Puerto del Inglés, the Englishman's port. For more than two centuries little else happened here. Luis Risopatrón's geographical dictionary of Chile, published in 1924, described a deep bay with a sandy beach and a good landing for boats, used only by fishermen and opening onto completely desolate country without water or any other resource.

The history of the area belongs to Caldera, 6 km to the north. The port was founded in 1850 to serve the silver and copper mines inland, and the railway from Caldera to Copiapó, opened in 1851 with the backing of the American businessman William Wheelwright, was the first in Chile. Copper smelters worked in the port in the 1850s and again from the 1880s into the 20th century, and the coast was struck by earthquakes and tsunamis in 1868, 1877 and 1922.

Since then the fishing cove has become a beach resort, with campsites, hotels, restaurants and holiday houses. The 2017 census counted 535 residents and 1,234 dwellings. The desert behind the bay has also become known to science: the Bahía Inglesa Formation is one of the richest fossil beds in Chile, and at Cerro Ballena north of Caldera the skeletons of more than 40 whales were excavated in 2011–12.

Bahía Inglesa is above all a summer place. Its white beaches of crushed shell and its clear water are counted among the best in Chile, and in January and February families fill the holiday houses and campsites. Out of season it is a quiet village, with many houses shut.

Food has become part of its identity. For about a decade the beaches have hosted the Festival Internacional de Gastronomía Bahía Inglesa, Cocinas del Pacífico, which brings together cooking from countries around the Pacific; the eleventh edition, in 2025, invited China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Ecuador and Peru. Local identity is also tied to the sea's produce — scallops are farmed along this coast — and to the fossils of the surrounding desert, which give Caldera and Bahía Inglesa a place in Chilean palaeontology.

Caldera supplies the history: its wooden Church of San Vicente de Paul, built in 1862, holds an image of the Virgin of Sorrows brought from Peru after the War of the Pacific, and its municipal cemetery, opened in 1876, was the first secular cemetery in Chile, with cast-iron tombs made by English craftsmen. Manners are relaxed and informal, in the style of a Chilean beach town.

Bahía Inglesa is classed as a rural village, and the 2017 census counted about 540 permanent residents, along with 1,234 dwellings, many of them used only in summer. Most services — the bank, supermarkets, schools, bus offices — are in Caldera, the commune's town, and shared taxis run between the two.

The local economy is shared with Caldera. Copper mining and citrus growing inland supply the port, which exports minerals and fruit, and the Candelaria copper and gold mine ships its ore through the mechanised port of Punta Padrones. Fishing and tourism are the other mainstays, and in Bahía Inglesa itself tourism is almost everything: restaurants, cabañas, campsites and summer rentals.

The rhythm follows the seasons. In summer the beach and the seafront road are crowded from late morning until long after dark, while in winter the sea fog lingers, many businesses close and the village is left to its residents. Water, in one of the driest places on Earth, is a constant concern across the Atacama Region.

The seafood of the Atacama coast is the basis of eating here. Ostiones, scallops farmed in the bays around Caldera and Bahía Inglesa, are the local speciality, eaten raw with lemon, grilled, or baked with grated parmesan cheese in the Chilean style known as a la parmesana. Machas (surf clams), locos (the Chilean abalone, in fact a large sea snail), fried fish and ceviche fill out the menus of the seafront restaurants.

Empanadas are the everyday food of the beach — baked empanadas de pino filled with minced beef, onion, egg and olive, or fried ones filled with cheese or seafood. Caldera has long-established empanada shops and simple seafood restaurants, and its markets and supermarkets supply the holiday houses and campsites.

To drink there is pisco, the grape brandy of northern Chile, served as a pisco sour or with cola as a piscola, along with Chilean beer and wine. The village's Pacific cooking festival, Cocinas del Pacífico, adds chefs and dishes from Asia and the rest of Latin America to the local repertoire for its duration.