Few places on Earth stop people in their tracks the way Chile's Atacama Desert does. Located in northern Chile, wedged between the Pacific coast and the spine of the Andes, the Atacama is officially the driest non-polar desert on the planet. Some weather stations here have never recorded a single drop of rain in their entire operational history. Yet this extreme aridity is precisely what makes the region so visually arresting: with almost no moisture to scatter light, the skies above are crystalline, the colours at ground level are fierce and saturated, and the geological formations look borrowed from another world entirely.