The Bajo la Noche de Atacama Project
Bajo la Noche de Atacama is an astrotourism project in San Pedro de Atacama, focused on the human experience of observing the sky.
For thousands of years, every person who walked the earth cultivated a personal relationship with the sky: they used it to find their way, to mark time, to tell their stories. Today that relationship has all but disappeared. We are here to help you reclaim it.
That is why we don't lead a night-time observation merely as science communicators, nor as conventional tour guides. We lead it as people who have spent years watching the sky from the Atacama Desert, and who want others to develop a relationship of their own with it too.
Rodrigo Zúñiga
Observations at Bajo la Noche de Atacama are led by Rodrigo Zúñiga: writer, astronomy communicator and co-founder of the project.
Rodrigo has been observing the night sky from San Pedro de Atacama for more than ten years. In that time he has published three books on constellations and skywatching: Las constelaciones del zodiaco desde latitudes australes (The Zodiac Constellations from Southern Latitudes, 2019), Constelaciones de animales voladores (Constellations of Flying Animals, 2023) and Textos para recuperar el cielo (Notes for Reclaiming the Sky, 2023). His approach has been featured in National Geographic Traveller UK.
He always speaks about the sky from the human experience of it: not from data, but from what it means to look up and see that there is something more — the invisible shapes that return only when human eyes turn to the sky.
Our
observation
site
We operate from a place we have restored, and where we have designed and built our observation site, in the ayllu of Cúcuter, 8 kilometres south of San Pedro de Atacama. The place is not just a location: it is the condition that makes our way of observing the sky possible.