A Window to the Universe

Long before modern telescopes allowed us to explore the cosmos through a lens, the Atacameño people looked at the sky with awe and respect. The inhabitants of Atacama planned their lives, their crops and even some of their rituals around the stars. It’s all part of the Andean worldview.

Unlike the Western way of looking at the universe, the inhabitants of the Atacama had a special interpretation of the sky, where the Milky Way was not only a luminous band of stars and gases, but a celestial river called Hatu Mayu (River of Heaven), which connected the earthly world with the spiritual one. Today we are guided by the stars, but the ancestors were guided by the dark nebulae, which were associated with animals and other mythological beings such as the fox (Ataq), llamas (Catuchillay and Uñallamacha), partridge (Yutu) and more. The moon, the sun, the stars and climatic phenomena are also fundamental elements in the Atacama worldview.

If you want to know more about the ancestors of the Atacama’s view of infinity, we invite you to visit us next season at Tierra Atacama, to get a closer look at the stars and be enriched by altiplano culture.