The Licancabur has a story, every mountain has one
Miths, legends and fables of Atacama
In the desert, everything seems as if it has always been here, unshaken. But suddenly, the mountains come alive, the sky transforms into an archetypal llama, and the animals speak to man and woman in their own language. The silence of the high plateau is thus filled with voices, swells with meaning, and becomes deeper than it appears at first glance. It is often thought that the desert reproduces itself, like the infinity of a mirror; but what these collected stories do—whether from eyewitness accounts or bibliographic sources—is shatter this image into a thousand pieces, thus telling the other story of the desert, which transforms it into a vessel filled with the energy of the world. Licancabur ceases to be a simple dormant volcano, giving way to its legend...
Finally, like any compilation, this is not a book that exhausts the high Andean mythological side of the Atacama Desert, but rather a sample of the stories that redefine and give life to this place. We hope that reading it will open up the Atacama obsidian and from it will spring a new kind of admiration for this territory.