Atacama Desert Map: 13 Places, Altitudes and Distances

This Atacama desert map shows the part of northern Chile that travellers actually visit: the oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama, at 2,407 m, with the Valle de la Luna 13 km to the west, the El Tatio geysers 67 km to the north at 4,320 m, the Salar de Atacama salt flat to the south, and the borders with Bolivia and Argentina to the east. Below are three maps at three scales, drawn by us from public geographic data, a table with the altitude and straight-line distance of every place on them, and their coordinates at the end.

Where is the Atacama Desert

In northern Chile, between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, south of Peru and west of Bolivia and Argentina. NASA’s Earth Observatory describes it as one of the world’s driest deserts, where salt pans and gorges meet the foothills of the Andes.

The box marks the area of the detailed map below. Map by Latin Lands from Natural Earth data (public domain).

The visitor’s Atacama is a smaller area inside it: the Antofagasta Region, and within it the commune of San Pedro de Atacama, in the province of El Loa. That is where the oasis, the salt flat and the high lagoons are, and where every tour of the desert starts.

The Atacama Desert map: from the coast to the borders

Northern Chile from Antofagasta to the Bolivian and Argentine borders. Dashed lines are international borders; the salt flat outline is generalised. Map by Latin Lands from Natural Earth data (public domain) and Wikidata coordinates.

Read the map from left to right and it explains the whole logistics of a visit. The coast at Antofagasta is 239 km from San Pedro in a straight line. The airport that serves the desert is inland, at Calama, 86 km from San Pedro. And the town sits at the northern tip of the Salar de Atacama, with the high Andes, the geysers and the borders all within a morning’s drive to the north and east.

Place	Altitude	From San Pedro
San Pedro de Atacama, the oasis town	2,407 m
Valle de la Luna, eroded valley		13 km W
Puritama, hot springs in a gorge		27 km NE
Licancabur, volcano on the border	5,920 m	34 km E
Toconao, village by the salt flat	2,485 m	37 km SE
Hito Cajón, border post to Bolivia	4,549 m	41 km E
Laguna Chaxa, flamingo lagoon	2,299 m	47 km S
El Tatio, geyser field	4,320 m	67 km N
El Loa, Calama’s airport	2,299 m	86 km NW
Calama, mining city	2,260 m	90 km NW
Miscanti, high lagoon	4,140 m	101 km SE
Paso de Jama, border to Argentina	4,200 m	121 km E
Antofagasta, port city	Coast	239 km W

Straight-line distances are our calculation from each place’s coordinates; roads are longer. The border altitudes come from Chile’s border authority, the rest from the coordinates’ source, listed at the end of this page.

Map of the area around San Pedro de Atacama

Most of what people come to see is within 50 km of the town, and at this scale the region map crowds it. Here it is on its own:

The 50 km around San Pedro. El Tatio is off the top of this map, 67 km to the north. Map by Latin Lands from Natural Earth data (public domain) and Wikidata coordinates.

Two things this scale makes obvious. The Valle de la Luna is next door, 13 km away, which is why it is usually an afternoon, not a day. And Bolivia is closer than the geysers: the Hito Cajón post is 41 km east in a straight line, El Tatio 67 km north.

That geometry is how we lay out the desert half of our 13-day Atacama and Patagonia route: four nights in San Pedro, the short trips first while your body adjusts, and El Tatio, the highest and earliest outing, on the last morning before the flight from Calama.

Getting there: Calama, then the road

The desert’s airport is El Loa, at Calama. From there San Pedro is about 100 km and an hour and a quarter by road, the transfer our Chile route uses. The drive is not a climb: San Pedro, at 2,407 m, is only 147 m higher than Calama.

Antofagasta, on the coast, gives the region its name, but it is 239 km from San Pedro in a straight line. For a desert trip it is the wrong door.

The borders: Bolivia at Hito Cajón, Argentina at Jama

San Pedro is a border town in all but name, and the map shows why so many routes cross here.

Hito Cajón, to Bolivia. According to Chile’s border authority, the complex is at 4,549 m on route CH-27, is open only to cars and minibuses, and its nearest town is San Pedro. The authority’s own opening notice put it 43 km from the town. It is the border on the road between San Pedro and the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia: the fifteen-day version of our Uyuni salt flats tour ends by coming down it, from the Bolivian high plateau into San Pedro.

Paso de Jama, to Argentina. The complex, which sits on the Argentine side, is at 4,200 m and serves both San Pedro and Calama.

Altitude on the map: 2,400 m to 4,500 m in a morning

Every outing from San Pedro is a climb from the town, and the map’s altitudes are the reason the order of a visit matters.

Place	Altitude	Rise from San Pedro
San Pedro de Atacama	2,407 m
Miscanti lagoon	4,140 m	+1,733 m
Paso de Jama	4,200 m	+1,793 m
El Tatio	4,320 m	+1,913 m
Hito Cajón	4,549 m	+2,142 m

Sleeping in San Pedro and going up for the day is the sensible pattern, and the high outings belong at the end of a stay, not on the first morning. Our South America altitude guide explains the thresholds.

Laguna Chaxa, on the Salar de Atacama, in February. Photo by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The protected areas on the map

Several of the places on these maps are inside one reserve. CONAF, Chile’s forest service, manages the Los Flamencos National Reserve: 73,986.5 hectares in the commune of San Pedro de Atacama, created on 17 October 1990. Its sectors include the Valle de la Luna (sector 6), the Soncor system on the salt flat, where Laguna Chaxa is, and the Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons (sector 3).

Check CONAF’s page before you go: sectors close for weather. On 1 October 2026 it listed the Miscanti and Miñiques sector as closed by snow on route 23-CH, after a winter in which NASA recorded rare, widespread snow across the Atacama in August 2026, from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.

When the map changes with the season

The geography does not move, but access does. Our Chile route runs from October to April, and its own month table marks January and February as the worst months for the desert, when the summer storms of the high plateau bring floods and road closures; in January 2026 San Pedro itself flooded. In winter the risk is the opposite one: snow on the high roads, as above. The month-by-month detail, set against Patagonia’s season, is on the Atacama and Patagonia route page.

How these maps were made

We drew the three maps ourselves rather than embedding a commercial map, so that every point on them can be checked:

• Coastline, borders and the salt flat: Natural Earth, at 1:10 million, which is in the public domain. The salt flat outline is generalised at that scale.
• Places: the coordinates recorded for each one in Wikidata, San Pedro de Atacama being the first. Altitudes come from the same records, except the two border complexes, which come from Chile’s border authority.
• Projection: a simple equirectangular projection corrected for latitude, the same method as the route maps on our tour pages. It is accurate enough to compare distances at this scale; it is not for navigation.
• Distances: straight lines between coordinates. Where we quote a road distance, we say whose it is.

The coordinates used, in decimal degrees:

Place	Latitude	Longitude
San Pedro de Atacama	−22.9108	−68.2001
Valle de la Luna	−22.9112	−68.3230
Puritama hot springs	−22.7208	−68.0447
Licancabur	−22.8336	−67.8828
Toconao	−23.1905	−68.0071
Hito Cajón (the pass)	−22.8808	−67.7983
Laguna Chaxa	−23.3281	−68.1669
El Tatio	−22.3314	−68.0103
El Loa airport	−22.4897	−68.9036
Calama	−22.4624	−68.9272
Miscanti lagoon	−23.7250	−67.7650
Paso de Jama	−23.2375	−67.0764
Antofagasta	−23.6464	−70.3981