Explora Hotel Architecture in San Pedro de Atacama by German Del Sol

Travel opens up new perspectives, to see life with new eyes. This Hotel invites travelers to stop wondering, and make a fruitful pause. Life, dispersed in Atacama's vastness, is somehow present at the hotel, inviting visitors to go out and experience first hand its natural and cultural richness, and return every evening back to comfort, free of the sheer tasks of survival.

San Pedro de Atacama is a 34,000 acres cultivated oasis, inhabited for more than two thousand years, in dispersed neighborhoods called Ayllus. The colonial town was founded instead, by the Spanish conquerors, as a square grid of long streets around the main square. The hotel takes some distance from existing settlements, to found a new town in Atacama.

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It also follows the pre-Columbian tradition of buildings that stand isolated in big public squares, establish multiple relationships between them and nature, and create towns without the use of streets. The Hotel buildings are a sequence of interior and exterior places, as happens in other small towns in Atacama, where the public and the private are not very well defined.

Architect: German del Sol
Location: San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
Project team: Horacio Schmidt R. / Architect, Nicole Labbé / Architect, Carlos Venegas / Architect, Hernán Fierro / Graphic Arts
Contractor: Salfa S.A.

Structural Engineer: Fernando del Sol y Enzo Valladares
Electrical Consultant: Renato Lorca
Sanitary Consultant: Francisco Cervantes

Constructed Area: 5,481 sqm
Project year: 1998 – 2000
Photographs: Guy Wenborne, Guy St. Clair, Mirta Soliz