Diego de Almagro
Diego de Almagro sits at 810 metres in the Atacama, a working copper-country town that spent three centuries going by the name Pueblo Hundido — Sunken Town — before someone decided it deserved a conquistador's name instead. The old railway station still stands downtown, stripped of its trains since the 1970s when the passenger lines were cut and the Pan-American highway was rerouted through Chañaral, leaving the town to find its own pace.
About 14,000 people live here, most connected in some way to the mines — Esperanza, El Salvador, the Santo Domingo project out in the hills. The streets are quiet by the standards of the region's larger centres, and the light in the late afternoon does what Atacama light does: turns everything copper-coloured and very still.
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People who pass through more than once tend to linger at the old station longer than they planned — the empty platforms and the desert framing behind them make for photographs that look almost staged. The local markets are worth a slow walk, less for souvenirs than for the sense of what a town this remote actually runs on day to day.
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Book directly at the providerHow Diego de Almagro came to be
The settlement grew in the 17th century to serve the Tres Gracias mine, one of many mineral operations scattered through this stretch of the Atacama. Its original name, Pueblo Hundido, points to something older and stranger: a bishop's account of a natural catastrophe — trees overturned, ground cracked open, parts of an earlier settlement swallowed by a great mudflow. The disaster became local legend, the name stuck for centuries.
In 1977, Pueblo Hundido was officially renamed Diego de Almagro, after the Spanish conquistador (c. 1475–1538) who led the first military expedition from Peru into central Chile. Almagro never founded a city on Chilean soil — he was defeated at the Battle of Las Salinas in 1538 and executed that same year — but his name now marks a town built entirely on the logic of extraction, which is its own kind of history.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
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When to go
The climate is arid year-round, with temperatures ranging from around 11°C on cool winter nights to about 23°C on warm summer days — rarely extreme in either direction. Annual rainfall barely reaches 8mm in total, so clear skies are the default, and the darkness at night is good enough for serious stargazing.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.