Settlement on the Atacama Desert

Motivated by the great development of the nitrate industry, from the 1870s through to the late 1950s, thousands of people migrated to the most arid desert on Earth. In the Pampa, average annual temperatures rise to 30°C during the day and plummet to 2°C at night. Moreover, due to the extreme lack of rainfall in the area, it is impossible to grow anything.
In this hostile environment, miners and their families coming from Peru, Bolivia and Chile lived and worked in company-towns for decades, processing the largest deposit of this mineral in the whole world while forging a distinctive culture. Men always predominated and women of all ages were scarce. The majority of them were country folk who had decided to emigrate because of the poor conditions reigning on Chilean farms and estates. The workers of Bolivian and Peruvian origin, on the other hand, generally came from the Andean valleys.