Iquique walking tour & city guide

The city

Baquedano Street has wooden Georgian-style buildings from the nitrate boom, with wooden sidewalks. The Plaza Prat has a clock tower. Cavancha Beach is the main beach.

Around

The abandoned nitrate towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Paragliders take off from the huge dune of Cerro Dragón.

A day in Iquique

Walk along Baquedano Street, with its wooden buildings, and visit the Regional Museum. Relax at Cavancha Beach.

Take a tour to Humberstone, the abandoned nitrate town.

Good to know

Iquique has sunshine all year. Paragliding from the dunes is popular.

The duty-free zone, ZOFRI, attracts shoppers.

Why it is worth the trip

Iquique sits on a narrow strip of land between the Pacific and a coastal cliff topped by Cerro Dragón, one of the largest urban sand dunes in the world. Thanks to steady winds and almost no rain, it is considered one of the best places on Earth for paragliding, and tandem flights glide from the cliff over the city to land on the beach. Surfers come for powerful reef breaks.

The city's wealth came from nitrate, the 'white gold' mined in the desert in the late 19th century. In Humberstone and Santa Laura, abandoned company towns, you can walk through the theater, the school, the swimming pool made from a ship's hull and the empty workers' houses, a haunting glimpse of desert life. The Palacio Astoreca, a wooden mansion in the center, shows how the nitrate barons lived.