Norte Chico - Valle del Encanto

Last weekend we took a long drive to the northern part of Chile called Norte Chico. The goal of the trip was to visit a couple of remote national parks, hit a few beaches and see some of the desert.

Our first stop was Valle del Encanto, a small park with petroglyphs from some indigenous culture [1] a couple of hours north of Santiago. The park was staffed by a lone archaeologist who charged us admission (about 75 cents), gave us some basic directions and let us wander around freely. So we climbed over the rocks for about an hour looking for petroglyphs.

Many of them were in excellent shape considering they were carved 1500 to 1900 years ago:

There were a couple of areas that were quite densely carved with petroglyphs. This photo was taken at a small pond surrounded by rocks and shows several carvings (click through to see the notes):

Los Banos Del Inca, a 1.5 metre deep basin that was apparently used like a bath tub, was also impressive:

We couldn't figure out if it was natural or carved by the inhabitants. There were small holes called tacitas, used for grinding corn and arrowheads, in many of the rocks:

So maybe they could've carved the bathtubs too.

Valle del Encanto was a lot less, um, polished than the historic sites we find in Canada:

But that was a pleasant change, actually. We were able to explore and discover the site on our own, including climbing up to the petroglyphs high on the rocks. Here everything would be paved and roped off for issues of liability as much as preservation.

(I've posted my photos from Valley del Encanto on Flickr.)

1. I think it was the Molle people who lived here. (Spanish Wikipedia has an entry on Valle del Encanto that seems to confirm this.)