La Serena & the Elqui Valley

The valleys of the Coquimbo Region were home to the El Molle culture, whose people carved petroglyphs and cup-shaped hollows into rock from around the start of the first millennium, and later to the Diaguita, farmers known for pottery painted with geometric designs. The Inca extended their rule here in the 15th century, and their road ran through the valleys towards central Chile.

La Serena was founded in 1544 on the orders of Pedro de Valdivia to secure the route between Peru and Santiago, making it one of the oldest cities in Chile. It was destroyed by an indigenous uprising in 1549 and refounded the same year by Francisco de Aguirre. In the colonial period it was a small agricultural and mining town, sacked by the English privateer Bartholomew Sharp in 1680. Copper and silver mining in the 19th century brought wealth and made Coquimbo a busy port with a British trading community.

In the mid-20th century President Gabriel González Videla, a native of La Serena, launched the Plan Serena, which rebuilt much of the city in a uniform neo-colonial style and added the lighthouse on the seafront. In 1945 Gabriela Mistral, raised in the Elqui Valley, became the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. From the 1960s international observatories were built on the region's mountains, and in 2015 the Illapel earthquake and tsunami damaged the coast.

The Elqui Valley has a strong place in Chilean imagination, largely because of Gabriela Mistral, whose childhood at Montegrande shaped her poetry and who is buried there. The valley also attracts people drawn by its reputation for spiritual energy, from meditation retreats to UFO spotters, and its clear skies made it the site of the first International Dark Sky Sanctuary.

Pisco is a matter of identity. Chilean pisco comes from the Atacama and Coquimbo regions, a designation of origin that Chile protects in law, and the rivalry with Peru over who owns the drink is taken seriously. The village of La Unión was renamed Pisco Elqui in 1936 to press the point.

Diaguita heritage remains visible: their pottery designs appear widely in local crafts. Rural life in the Limarí and Choapa valleys revolves around goat herding, with seasonal movements of flocks to the mountains. Religious festivals such as the Fiesta Grande of Our Lady of Andacollo each December, the most important in the Norte Chico, with music and dancing, mark the calendar.

La Serena and Coquimbo form a single urban area of more than 500,000 people along the bay, about two-thirds of the region's population, the first an administrative, university and tourist city, the second a working port. Ovalle is the main town of the Limarí valley, and Illapel and Los Vilos serve the Choapa province to the south.

The economy combines mining — the Los Pelambres copper mine in the Choapa valley is one of Chile's largest — with farming, fishing, astronomy and tourism. The valleys grow grapes for pisco and table fruit, avocados and vegetables, and goats provide cheese in the dry hills.

Water is the dominant issue. A long drought has shrunk reservoirs, hit farmers and goat herders hard, and led to disputes over allocation between agriculture, mining and towns. La Serena's growth has also brought traffic and concerns about construction along the coast, and summer turns the beachfront into one of Chile's busiest resorts.

The region's signature product is pisco, the grape brandy distilled from muscat and other aromatic grapes grown in the Elqui and Limarí valleys, drunk as pisco sour or mixed with cola as piscola. Papayas grown in the valleys — the small, fragrant Chilean papaya — are sold preserved in syrup, and La Recova market sells them with dried fruit and local sweets.

Goat's cheese from the Limarí valley and the dry hills is a regional staple, eaten fresh or aged, and kid goat, cabrito, is roasted for festivals. On the coast, fishing coves such as Tongoy and Guanaqueros serve seafood empanadas, machas a la parmesana (surf clams baked with parmesan) and fresh fish.

The Limarí valley has also become a respected wine region, known for cool-climate Chardonnay and Syrah grown near the coast. Sweet treats include alfajores, dulce de leche biscuits sold at roadside stalls, and the Elqui's raisins and dried peaches.

La Serena has a compact centre of stone churches, including the cathedral and San Francisco, the La Recova market, a Japanese garden and the seafront lighthouse at the start of the long Avenida del Mar beach. Coquimbo, next door, has its historic English quarter, the Mohammed VI cultural centre with its mosque, and the large Cruz del Tercer Milenio on a hill above the bay.

Inland, the Elqui Valley runs east past the Puclaro reservoir to Vicuña, with its Gabriela Mistral museum and the Capel pisco plant, then on to Montegrande and Pisco Elqui, where distilleries such as Los Nichos, the oldest working one in Chile, offer tastings. Tourist observatories such as Mamalluca near Vicuña give views of the southern sky, while the research observatory of Cerro Tololo opens for daytime visits on Saturdays.

North of La Serena, boats from Punta de Choros visit the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve around Isla Damas and Isla Choros. South, near Ovalle, the Valle del Encanto preserves petroglyphs, and Fray Jorge National Park protects a fog-fed forest on the coastal hills, a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The beaches of Tongoy and Guanaqueros complete the coast.