August 15, 2020. (Click on the image for a wide, high-resolution image.)
If you accidentally come across the town of Huacachina, you might think it’s a mirage. Huacachina is centered around a lagoon lined with lush vegetation – all located in the driest desert in the world. Nestled among the largest sand dunes in South America, it is the continent’s only natural oasis.
On August 15, 2020, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) at Landsat 8 captured this image of Huacachina and the adjacent sand dunes. Huacachina is located in southwestern Peru on the edge of the Atacama Desert. The city is located approximately 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the city of Ica.
Huacachina roughly translates to “crying woman” in Quechua and has several mythological origin stories. Legend has it that a beautiful Inca princess named Huacachina mourned the loss of her loved one, and her tears created the lagoon. One day a warrior saw her and frightened the princess, who ran into the water to hide for hours. When she tried to leave, she had turned into a mermaid. Another version says that the princess was holding a mirror and admiring herself when the warrior saw her. When she walked away in shock, the mirror fell and shattered. The glass became the little pool in the desert and consumed the princess and turned her into a mermaid. Many legends say that Huacachina still lives in the pool and comes out at night to entice swimmers.
The oasis is actually formed by water from underground aquifers that seeps through the sand and promotes the growth of palm, eucalyptus and carob trees around the pool. The lagoon, which covers only about 2 hectares, is surrounded on the edge by businesses, hotels and restaurants. The oasis city has about 100 inhabitants all year round. In recent years, water levels in the lagoon have dropped due to the drilling of nearby wells and increased evaporation during the hot summers. As a result, the city has fed water from the outside to the lagoon.
Huacachina is about a five-hour bus ride from Lima and has been a popular tourist destination for over 70 years. The city entertained many of Peru’s financial elite in the 1940s, and today tens of thousands of tourists are entertained every year. Huacachina, once called the “Oasis of America”, was on the 50 Nueva Sol banknote until 2006.
The soaring sand dunes behind the oasis rise several hundred meters high – as high as small mountains. They offer excellent sandboarding adventures: adrenaline junkies can slide like tubers or snowboarders through the dunes. Visitors can also drive or hike dune buggies through the dunes, although the sand makes walking strenuous.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the US Geological Survey. Photo by Havardtl and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.