Puritama Hot Springs

The canyon announces itself before you see it — a change in the air, a faint warmth rising from the earth, a smell like clean mineral water pushed through hot rock. The road from San Pedro climbs northeast toward the Andes, and Puritama sits in a fold of these mountains that the Atacameño people have known about for centuries. When they built their irrigation channels and terraced fields, this was the warm place, the healing place, the place you came to after the cold and the labor. You understand that immediately when you step out of the car.

There are eight pools, connected by wooden walkways and separated by natural stone weirs. The water runs between 33 and 35 degrees — body-warm, comfortable, tinted faintly by dissolved minerals to a pale amber. The canyon walls above are ochre and volcanic brown, and the thermal water has fed a thin line of vegetation — rushes, small desert willows, a few reeds — that seems impossibly green against the stone. I lowered myself into the second pool from the top and sat there for forty-five minutes thinking about nothing particular, which is not something I do easily.

The upper pools are shallower and slightly hotter; the lower pools wider and cooler, with better views down the canyon. I moved between them slowly, spending perhaps twenty minutes in each, watching the quality of the light on the canyon walls change as the sun shifted overhead. In the morning, the light comes over the east rim and illuminates the pools from above with that specific quality of desert sunlight — sharp, clean, without mercy. The steam rising off the water catches the light and disappears. The cold air outside the pool makes getting in each time feel like a small act of courage.

Other visitors were there — the place is not a secret — but the pools are distributed across enough of the canyon that you rarely feel crowded. I shared a lower pool with a Dutch couple who were six weeks into a South American road trip and had the relaxed, slightly weathered quality of people who had stopped worrying about schedules. We talked for a while about the desert, about what it does to your sense of time. Then we stopped talking. Which was the right call.

The walk down the canyon path before the pools takes about thirty minutes and passes through desert scrub where viscachas — fat, rabbit-like rodents with long curling tails — sit on rocks in the sun and watch you go by with tremendous unconcern. They look like they have been there since the Holocene and expect to be there when you leave. At the bottom, the canyon opens into the pool area and you hear the water before you see it, and something in the body relaxes preemptively.

When to go: Year-round, but the experience shifts by season. In winter, June through August, the contrast between freezing air and warm water is extreme and genuinely exhilarating — you alternate between the cold of the air and the warmth of the pool with your whole body. In summer the warmth is less dramatic but the canyon light is beautiful. Arrive before 11am to beat the day-trippers from San Pedro.