**3. From a natural scenario to the possibilities of a tourist image: The dialectics of host and guest**

The first maps of the desert were made by European scientists hired by the Chilean govern‐ ment, such as those of the German citizen Rodulfo A. Philippi in 1860 and the French citizen Pedro A. Pissis in 1877, and later, Alejandro Bertrand in the 1880s and Francisco J. San Román in 1892, who also established during his scientific mission in 1883 the toponymy of the main geographic accidents (from sierras to cordilleras, hills, and volcanoes) [14].

The impression of engineers Bertrand and San Roman about the indigenous populations of the pre-Andes was characterized by the ethnocentric optics of establishing primitive societies with barbarian customs. This led to the consideration of space in Antofagasta Region—that became a province in 1888—from three perspectives:

(a) The anthropological view of European explorers and travelers; (b) the archaeological vestiges of the region exhibited in different European museums, and (c) notes about the landscape.

Marc Boyer [15] pointed out that the British coined the neologisms "Tourist" and "Tourism," deriving from the term "Tour" used by the aristocratic sectors of their society when traveling to Italy for educational purposes, Rome, and the centers that could feed natural curiosity about the legacy of classical Old Times. Afterward, there were changes in goals, patrimony, the rescue of springs and swimming places, and sacred pilgrimage. In the early twentieth century, the seaside and the Mediterranean sun encouraged mass tourism.

Exploration trips to the New World were due to man's new sciences, archaeology, and anthropology. Amanda Stronza points out the different reasons that have made anthropolo‐ gists get interested in tourist trips, new life styles, belief systems, shared experiences, the construction of the puzzles of different places, stories and, at the same time, reflected the deepest values of a society. Following Graburn, Stronza states that tourism is "as a kind of ritual process that reflects society's deeply held values about health, freedom, nature, and selfimprovement" [16]. Several travelers who went through Atacama Desert mixed notes about indigenous population with impressions about the landscape, sometimes with Darwinistic underlying concepts in fashion or accepting definitions of culture, such as the one by Edward Tylor, which showed an ethnocentric view of civilization stages. The French citizen André Bresson, who experienced the impact of Caracoles mine on coast villages and the appearance of mining camps in the middle of the paramo in the 1870s, could not avoid making notes about indigenous changos on Paposo coast. "We could observe Indians from changos tribe, curious remnants of primitive population. Changos are all fishermen" [17]. Changos were those inhabitants who went around fishermen's wharfs to the north and south of Antofagasta during the nitrate cycle. An old neighbor of the city, Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes, reported that some changos were confused with the mythic "Chango López," Antofagasta's first citizen.

Bresson's observations were published in one of the French most popular magazines, Le Tour du Monde. Several writers/explorers sent their work to this magazine which, as Chaumeil pointed out, in mixing text and pictures "it became the most popular adventure newspaper of the time. Many travelers published here and were so successful that they were offered to publish their accounts in a book" [18].

The accounts about excavations by European scientific missions concerning the indigenous populations of the pre-Andes, Atacameños, and changos on the coast began to spread the area in the showcases of the main European museums. These were inaugurated before the time we are concerned about by the French citizen Alcides D'Orbigny, **L'Homme Americien**, in 1839. The German citizen Dr. Otto Aischel collected several archaeological pieces from the coast of Antofagasta city, exhibited his collection in Santiago in 1908, and donated it to Kiel Museum, where he was a director. The French citizen Barón Albert de Dietrich made excavations in Chiu Chiu in 1894 and donated the collection to the Musée d' Ethnographie du Trocadéro from Paris. This also occurred with the important "Mission Francaise dans le Désert d'Atacama," which explored the Atacama area during the first five years of the nineteenth century. The pieces were exhibited in the Palacio du Trocadero [19]. The so-called "Father of Andean Archaeolo‐ gy," the German citizen Max Uhle, explored Calama gentilares during the 1920s, donating the pieces collected to the recently created Museum of Natural History in Santiago in May 1911. Englishman Ricardo E. Latcham, who collaborated with Uhle, also made excavations, thus increasing the collection in Santiago museum.

The showcases displaying the archaeological pieces of Atacama Desert, both in Europe and Chile, opened the door of the so-called "cultural tourism." According to the evolution theories, European museums exhibited the "samples" of the world's peripheral cultures. There was eagerness to learn about "other cultures," in a convergence between the exotic and the experiences of travelers from other parts of the world. There were all kinds of tourists who searched the desert, those who looked for the life styles of indigenous populations, and those who wanted to learn just for curiosity.

But the desert territory was also a three-dimensional place: On the coast, progress, positivistic mentality, and connectivity with the world. In the intermediate depression, the space for dominating, for being part of the world's circuits with nitrate and copper, where nature adversity gave ground to culture, expressed in the materiality of industrial installations, human dwelling, and the account of events that told the story of those places—nitrate mines —and finally the pre-Andes, the Andean piedmont, where villages were unknown and space undiscovered.

Meanwhile in the cities, following Linde and Labob's distinction mentioned by Certeau [20], urban ordering, blocks, and rules were a map for tourists. In the nitrate pampa, in the middle of Atacama Desert, it was necessary for the tourist to take a tour through ephemeral paths, roads, and cart tracks to find the nitrate mines. Antofagasta city map was clear and actually guided visitors/tourists. The map referring to pre-Andean locations and mining companies in the desert only contained references to the connections of telegraph posts belonging to the Antofagasta–Bolivia Railway network.

On the coast, foreigners started leaving testimonies of their experiences. In the main South American metallurgical complex of the late nineteenth century, Huanchaca, which operated between 1890 and 1902, located to the south of Antofagasta, the son of the Polish mining expert and second president of Universidad de Chile, Ignacio Domeyko, together with the German geologist Luis Darapasky, administrated this institution and could exhibit pictures. Its installations and machinery, designed by an American engineer, were presented in a geological congress in the USA, as reported by San Román. Darapasky published one of the most important achievements in Berlin in 1900: the **Department of Taltal**.

Further south, the Spanish citizen Matías Granja opened the port of Coloso and the railway to Aguas Blancas nitrate canton in the beginning of the twentieth century. Pictures of this minor port were widely spread abroad. Europeans such as Theodor Plivier, German, who visited the port, published one of the most appreciated novels about the place in the 1930s: **Revolt on the Pampas**. Meanwhile, an English descendant, Carmen Smith de Espinosa, married to the port administrator, evoked the experiences of a selected woman belonging to regional society and the opposing reality of the city and the territory in **My Memories**.

British immigrants inaugurated one of the most popular places between Antofagasta and Coloso, for both the mystery of what they used to do there and the fact that it was far from the world noise, "Gringos Beach," frequently visited by travelers who stayed in Antofagasta– Bolivia Railway installations or in the different ranches they owned in the city.

The beginning of a kind of internal mass tourism was possible due to the concessions to European descendants for habilitating the first beaches in the city. José Sfeir, whose parents were German, was one of the main beneficiaries of these concessions, with Rhin Beach, along with Jorge Sabioncello, a Croatian nitrate company owner and one of the main merchants of the city. Manzano Beach and Maury Hotel, whose fiscal sites were rented to Jorge Sabioncello from April 29, 1910 to October 1930 by the Marine Ministry, extended for 5 years due to a future expansion [21]. The so-called Danubio Beach was the most visited. Its concession finished in 1932 [22] and was later replaced by the City Hall Beach, built by Jorge Tarbuscovic, a descend‐ ant of Croatian immigrants, the most important colony outside Europe, together with that in Punta Arenas.

Also, companies undertook the change of beaches. Concessions favoring The Nitrate Agencies Limited in Antofagasta, located to the north of Sucre Street, whose site was 915 m2 and Caleta del Cobre, 3 km to the north of Antofagasta, were renewed at the end of the 1930s [23].

The "incomparable beautiful" beaches and the "marvelous" climate were the main attractions published in the **Official Guide of the Industry, Art, and Commerce Exhibition and Fair**, during the first 5 years of the 1930s [24].

The marginality of modern life, poor houses, streets not included in the regulation map, poor people, and children going about the streets could be seen in the pre-Andes, nitrate pampa, and ocean cities because the law of compulsory primary education was passed in 1920. Some pictures and postcards briefly show this other reality, far from the central focus of the card, unlike letters and accounts about the socioeconomic reality of the territory. Was then a possibility of slumming tourism? A piece of data may be revealing. Englishmen had their own hospital and medical personnel in Antofagasta. When the Chilean State built a modern hospital with all the implements necessary for different operating rooms in 1912, the British colony refused to close the Antofagasta–Bolivia Railway hospital because a British citizen could not get involved with native population, let alone accept a non-British physician [25]. Probably, British and Germans, the colonies with the highest endogamy indexes in their social relations, may have taken the so-called "reality tours" or "social tours" that G. Weltz considered as "negative sightseeing," a practice born in Victorian England "as a leisure activity pursued at the time by the upper and upper-middle classes" [26]. The recurrent crises of the nitrate industry affected the whole territory: The nitrate mines stopped working, hundreds of unemployed people were hosted in suburban sectors to later travel to the south of the country, etc. This panorama was published by the press in pictures that showed pain.

Every nitrate company, British, German, Yugoslavian, Spanish, and certainly Chilean, made their own maps of their belongings and also counted on the maps of the Nitrate Fiscal Delegation. Unprecise latitudes and longitudes were solved only in 1910 when there was support from the Astronomy Observatory in Santiago, operated by German scientists.

It is interesting to note that how Europeans, owners of the nitrate mines, hosted their visitors. Some letters reveal the pride of introducing the progress of modernity in the houses provided to the administration or in guest houses. Here, they recreated the same comfort as in their own countries and also showed productive process innovations. By contrast, this space thoroughly demarcated in the nitrate mines of the Shanks system and later in the American nitrate mines of the Guggenheim system, classical in character and sometimes confused with ethnical/ classical, and had as a counterpart workers' rooms without electricity, sewerage, and furniture [27]. European pictures showed machinery, power plants, workshops, etc., and to a lesser extent, administrative personnel. They also enjoyed exhibiting the frenzy of pier work with ships at the ports of Antofagasta, Taltal, and Tocopilla, steamships, and the famous clippers, that is, sailing boats that made modern time stop to look at romantic times. The biggest and most famous of these clippers was Preussen, whose presence was frozen in a Tocopilla port postcard. There were many postcards and pictures about the nitrate mines and piers from the three first decades of the twentieth century [28,29].

There were some curious data about the space used by the nitrate industry in the varied technical books published in Europe from 1885 to 1910, particularly those of the German citizen Dr. Semper and Dr. Michel, such as three earthquakes every week, which were caused by volcanoes in the Andes [7]. In 1907, the great installation of the nitrate mines and the desert resettlement began, coinciding with the greater presence of immigrants in Antofagasta province.

A territory whose exploration began toward the end of the nineteenth century was the pre-Andes and the villages of San Pedro de Atacama, Chiu Chiu, Toconao, etc., which had been previously visited and reported by the French Jesuit Emilio Vaïsse, particularly Atacameños and their Kunza language [30]. Then, it was time to look at oases space. The first **Antofagasta Guide**, in 1894, referred to the green oases, water currents, and peaceful life, far from the frenzy affecting men living on the coast. They were an idyllic image foreigners would reaffirm, but now in a relation between nature and man. If Alejandro Bertrand and Francisco San Román [31] made a comparison between civilization and barbarity, they also observed the relation of what anthropology has named the distinction between the host and the guest, established by Valene Smith [32,33]. The Andean towns near Vegas de Turi called Earl Hanson' attention was ruined in 1926. He pointed out that "lie the ruins of an old city of copper workers, in which the Spaniards had evidently built a few adobe houses. What do these ruins mean to the present population? Absolutely nothing, as far as I could find out" [34]. Other locations such as Toconce, Aiquina, and Caspana were "out-of-the-world villages."

The pre-Andes offered an adventure field. Hanson traveled in a car, but the Italian–Arabic engineer Luis Abd-El-Kader organized mule and horse caravans in 1907 to explore these towns, which he confused with Inca Empire ruins. The pictures that he showed in the **Antofagasta Business Guide 1907** [35] still refer to the anthropological dichotomy of civilized beings and men in an inferior state, denoting an asymmetric relation between the host and the guest, particularly when pictures give a testimony of the arrival at a predetermined tourist destiny and the contrast with native people. The English archaeologist Ricardo Latcham had the same confusion about towns in the mid-1930s. He made observations and took pictures of his trips [36].
