Iquique

The Chango people fished this coast as early as 7000 BC, and the Incas later incorporated the area into their empire. Under Spain and then independent Peru, Iquique was little more than a landing place; when Charles Darwin called in 1834 he found a town short of water and firewood, both brought from far away. Guano and, above all, the nitrate deposits of the Atacama Desert inland turned it into a boom port in the mid-19th century, and its clock tower was built in 1878.

Territorial disputes between Bolivia and Chile led to the War of the Pacific. On 21 May 1879 the Peruvian ironclad Huáscar sank the Chilean corvette Esmeralda in the harbour, and Captain Arturo Prat, killed boarding the ironclad, became Chile's naval hero; the date is now Navy Day. The war gave Iquique to Chile, and the nitrate trade drew migrants from the rest of the country and from Europe and Asia, who built the timber mansions and clubs of the old quarter.

The boom had a brutal side. In December 1907 the army opened fire on thousands of striking nitrate workers and their families gathered at the Santa María school; the number killed is undetermined, with estimates from 500 to more than 2,000. Synthetic nitrate, made possible by the Haber–Bosch process, later ruined the trade. Revival came with industrial fishing from the 1950s, the free zone, ZOFRI, and large copper mines in the Andes. Earthquakes have repeatedly struck the city, including in 1868, 1877, 2005 and a magnitude 8.2 earthquake on 1 April 2014.

The nitrate era left Iquique with a cosmopolitan inheritance. Croatian, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Arab, British and French families settled here, and the Spanish Casino and the Croatian Club stand on Plaza Arturo Prat beside the Municipal Theatre, with the Chinese Club another landmark of the period. Many Peruvians and Bolivians live in the city, and about a thousand workers from British India arrived in the 1910s and 1920s, their descendants now part of the local population.

The Santa María massacre remains central to the city's memory and to the Chilean labour movement; the folk group Quilapayún's Cantata Santa María de Iquique of 1970, one of the group's most acclaimed recordings, tells its story, and a week of events marked its centenary in 2007. Unions of port, free-zone and mining workers are still influential.

Religious festivals bring the Andean world to the coast. Brass bands of the kind heard at La Tirana's July feast play on many of the floats that tour Iquique and Alto Hospicio before Christmas. Sport is part of daily life: Deportes Iquique is the football club, and Cavancha hosted the world bodyboarding championship in 2014.

The 2024 census counted about 200,000 people in the commune of Iquique, and Alto Hospicio on the plateau above has grown into a separate city that, with Iquique, forms Greater Iquique. Squeezed between sea and escarpment, the city has little flat land, so it has grown upwards: towers of more than 25 floors line Cavancha and Playa Brava, while new residential districts spread south towards Bajo Molle.

ZOFRI, the free zone, and the port are the backbone of the economy, alongside copper mines such as Collahuasi in the Andes, salt from the Salar Grande, fishing and tourism. Iquique is Chile's largest fishing port, mostly for anchovy and jack mackerel turned into fishmeal and fish oil, and its port handles much of the country's imports of used clothing.

Life is lived outdoors on the seafront, with surfing, bodyboarding and evening walks. The shortage of buildable land inside the city limits, which pushes new housing into towers or beyond the urban boundary, is a recurring concern.

Iquique's food mixes the Pacific with the legacy of its Chinese community. The area around the central market is the city's Chinatown, and chifa — the Chinese-Peruvian cooking of stir-fried rice, noodles and meats — is everyday food. The chumbeque, a sweet of the far north, was created in the region by a Cantonese immigrant and his wife: thin layers of fried pastry filled with fruit-flavoured caramel.

The sea supplies ceviche, fried fish and seafood dishes in restaurants along Cavancha and around the port, as elsewhere on the northern coast, although most of the catch landed at Chile's largest fishing port is turned into fishmeal and oil rather than eaten. Inland oases add fruit: the small, sharp limes of Pica give the local pisco sour its character, and Pica and Matilla are known for fruit desserts, above all alfajores, biscuits sandwiched with sweet filling.

Empanada shops in the centre serve turnovers for a quick lunch, and the malls have the usual fast-food chains.