Surfing Hornitos: the Atacama Desert guide

Hornitos is a small seaside village in the Mejillones commune, in the Antofagasta Region, sitting on the coast about 90 km north of Antofagasta and 32 km north of Mejillones. The village has close to 300 houses, occupied almost exclusively in summer by Antofagasta residents who come to drop a board for the holidays; in winter, almost nobody stays, and Hornitos still isn't connected to the national power grid or to piped drinking water outside the tourist season.

To get there, follow Route 1, the main coastal highway of northern Chile, then take the signposted turnoff to the beach. Better to arrive with your own food and water: almost nothing stays open the rest of the year.

That isolation tells you everything about the spot's real character: a long, exposed sand beach, with no resort infrastructure around it, where you come to surf self-sufficiently rather than lean on anything ready-made.

Hornitos is a classic beach break offering rights and lefts over sand, at its best with swell from the southwest. The offshore wind blows from the east and keeps the face clean; as soon as it swings onshore, the beach closes out fast.

The cliffs lining the south end of the beach give some shelter from wind and swell, a good call when it's more powerful; at the other end, the swell usually arrives bigger and less protected. The beach holds a modest one-to-one-and-a-half-metre swell with ease, and shrugs off much bigger swells well past two and a half metres.

Hornitos has a reputation for reliability: unlike many spots further south that depend on a precise swell window, it keeps some surf going for most of the year, with a peak in consistency from May to September, when Antarctic storms push their swell all the way to the desert.

Antofagasta, the nearest big city, has a history that fits in one sentence: it was born Bolivian. Founded in 1866 as an outpost for exporting saltpeter, with a port officially opened in 1868, it belonged at the time to Bolivia, which then held direct access to the Pacific along this stretch of desert.

On February 14, 1879, Chilean troops occupied the port after a tax dispute over the saltpeter mining companies: that was the start of the War of the Pacific, pitting Chile against Peru and Bolivia until 1884. Bolivia permanently ceded this coastal province, Antofagasta included, to Chile through the October 20, 1904 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, and has been without a coastline ever since.

Downtown Antofagasta still carries traces of this mining-era history: the Torre del Reloj, a clock tower modeled on Big Ben, was built as a reminder of the English presence in the saltpeter industry, with the Chilean and British flags intertwined at its base.

Saltpeter eventually gave way to copper. About 215 km northeast of Antofagasta lies Chuquicamata, one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world by volume extracted, in industrial operation since 1915; the copper travels down by rail to the port of Antofagasta for export. Long controlled by American capital, the mine was nationalized in the early 1970s and now belongs to Codelco, Chile's state-owned copper company.

Another railway, originally built to connect Antofagasta to Bolivia's Huanchaca silver mines, eventually pushed through to Oruro in 1892 and then La Paz in 1917: Bolivia, stripped of its coast since 1904, still exports part of its trade today through that very port it lost.

This double history, saltpeter then copper, explains why the region remains above all a mining and industrial one: Hornitos's beach tourism is a recent parenthesis in an economy built on what comes out of the desert floor.

The Atacama Desert, which borders Hornitos beach directly, is considered the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Its hyperarid core gets about 15 millimetres of rain a year, and the central sector bounded by Antofagasta, Calama and Copiapó has already gone through stretches of four straight years without a single recorded drop.

That extreme aridity, just metres from an ocean that regularly produces surfable swell, is one of the starkest contrasts in Chilean surfing: you park the car on ground that may never have seen rain, then paddle into a swell generated by storms thousands of kilometres away, in Antarctica.

The water itself stays cool year-round, around 18-19°C, carried by the cold Humboldt Current that runs the length of the Chilean coast. A summer wetsuit is usually enough, but pack something thicker for winter.

Hornitos welcomes all levels, especially on the cliff side at the south end of the beach, where the swell is more sheltered; a local surf school runs lessons there, mainly in summer when the village fills up. The main hazard is rip currents, common on this kind of exposed beach: better to stay grouped and check local conditions before paddling out if the swell picks up.

On supplies, caution is warranted. Outside the season, there's no guaranteed drinking water or stable power in the village: better to arrive equipped than to count on shops that close for winter.

If Hornitos is flat or too crowded in summer, Playa Cavancha, in the bay of Iquique further north, and Tres Playitas, in the Atacama and Coquimbo region further south, round out the three spots currently in Yosurf's Chilean catalogue, on a coastline stretching thousands of kilometres still largely unexplored.