Valle de la Luna, which means Moon Valley, lies 13 kilometers west of San Pedro de Atacama at the north end of the country near its border with Bolivia. This rugged, inhospitable looking landscape in the heart of the Atacama Desert attracts many visitors for its eerie resemblance to the surface of the moon, an effect caused by the erosion of its sand and stone features by wind and water over countless millennia. Despite its remoteness, this surprisingly beautiful landscape has sustained life for centuries, both human as well as that of numerous species of flora and fauna. Among its most interesting features are its dry lake beds (this is, after all, one of the driest places on the planet), which are white, due to deposited salt, and prone to producing fascinating natural saline outcrops. Other notable features of the Atacama Desert are the region's many caverns, some containing evidence of pictographs created by early man and where some of the world's oldest mummies, preserved by the area's aridity, were found (the most famous of these, the Chinchorro mummies, are now on display at the archaeological museum in San Miguel de Azapa).
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