Calama

The name is usually traced to Kunza, the old language of the Lickanantay, and one explanation reads it as 'town in the middle of the water': until the mid-20th century the oasis was bounded by the Loa River and by swamps, an island of green in the desert. Petroglyphs, cave sites and pre-Columbian cemeteries survive around the city, and at the junction of the Inca road with the routes from the coast to the Altiplano, Calama was the main resting place in the empty desert, growing maize and alfalfa to supply the empire's messengers.

Under Spain and then Bolivia it remained a supply stop on the trade routes between the port of Cobija, the silver of Potosí and the cattle country of Salta and Tucumán, and in 1840 it became the capital of Bolivia's Atacama Province. On 23 March 1879 the first battle of the War of the Pacific was fought at the Topáter ford outside the town, where Bolivian soldiers and civilians led by Ladislao Cabrera resisted a larger Chilean force; Eduardo Abaroa, who died there, is a Bolivian national hero. Calama became Chilean, gained a railway station on the Antofagasta–Bolivia line in 1886 and a municipality in 1888.

Copper made the modern city. Industrial mining began at Chuquicamata in 1915, American-owned until Chile nationalised it in 1971. In October 1973 the military squad known as the Caravan of Death executed prisoners at Calama. The city was devastated by an earthquake in 1955 and rebuilt on three times its earlier area, and it grew again when the Chuquicamata company town was emptied and its people rehoused in Calama between 2003 and 2007.

Calama is a company city in spirit. Generations of families lived and worked at Chuquicamata, where the American firm Anaconda built a company town beside the pit, once busy with banks, restaurants and playgrounds; a young Che Guevara described a visit to the mine in The Motorcycle Diaries. Mining still sets the rhythm, with workers travelling to shifts at Chuquicamata and other mines, and incomes, rents and prices to match.

Football is the great civic passion. Cobreloa, founded in 1977 with the backing of the copper company Codelco, rose to the top division in its first season and has won the Chilean championship eight times, and its stadium, the Zorros del Desierto — the desert foxes — opened in 2015.

The commune also takes in Quechua communities such as Estación San Pedro, Toconce and Cupo, and Lickanantay villages along the upper Loa including Chiu Chiu, Lasana, Aiquina-Turi and Caspana, where adobe churches and traditional farming survive. The memory of 1973 is kept by a memorial to the disappeared in the desert outside the city. One in five residents was born abroad, mostly elsewhere in South America, giving the city a growing mix of accents and kitchens.

The 2024 census counted 166,334 people in the commune, about 166,000, nearly all of them in the city, making it the second-largest city of the Antofagasta Region after Antofagasta itself. Immigrants made up about 21 per cent of the population. The centre keeps its old grid around the main square, while the city has spread outwards in new suburbs of brightly painted houses, many built for the families moved from Chuquicamata.

Copper is the economy. Chuquicamata, now run by Codelco, produced 289,000 tonnes of copper in 2024, the fifth-highest output of any mine in Chile, and since 2019 it has been moving from the open pit to an underground mine. Contractors, suppliers, transport firms, hotels and malls depend on the mines.

Life here means long shifts and long distances. Water is scarce in one of the driest cities on Earth, and the Loa, which once surrounded the oasis, is shared between mines, farms and towns. Crime above the Chilean average, high living costs and dependence on the copper price are the everyday concerns.

Calama eats the food of working northern Chile. The day's main meal is a long lunch, and the city's markets, cafés and canteens serve empanadas de pino — baked pastries of minced beef, onion, egg and olive — cazuela, a clear stew with meat, potato and pumpkin, and pastel de choclo, a baked pie of sweet ground corn over a meat filling. Completos, loaded Chilean hot dogs, are the standard snack. Chinese restaurants are a fixture, as in all of the north's mining cities.

The oasis farms of the Loa have long grown maize and alfalfa, and in the villages of the upper valley and around San Pedro, Andean ingredients appear: quinoa, broad beans, llama meat and the fruit of the chañar and algarrobo trees. Rica-rica, an aromatic shrub of the Andes, flavours teas and sours.

On the coast, Antofagasta is known for seafood — ceviche, fried conger eel, machas and locos. To drink there is pisco, the grape brandy of northern Chile, in a pisco sour or a piscola with cola, along with Chilean beer and wine; many households keep the Chilean once, an evening tea, in place of a late dinner.