Valle del Encanto (The Enchanted Valley)

This past weekend (Easter weekend) gave us our first 3-day weekend since arriving in Chile. So, it was a perfect opportunity to do even more exploring!

On Friday, we headed down to Valle del Encanto, about 90 minutes south of La Serena. Valle del Encanto is a National Archaeological Monument with petroglyphs and pictographs from the Molle culture dating from around 500-700 AD. It’s a really intriguing place with lots of opportunities to walk and boulder-scramble your way through the petroglyphs and pictographs.

Unlike last weekend’s visit to Fray Jorge National Park, Valle del Encanto only had one (extremely gregarious and, possibly, very bored) employee at the entrance to the area. He was full of useful information about the various zones (zonas) within the monument. That is, if you could understand his rapid Spanish! Actually, we’re getting better at it and had a pretty good idea of what he was saying.

You could drive down to a wonderful picnic area at the bottom of the valley and walk from there, or you could leave your car up at the entrance and walk down. We chose to walk from the entrance.

The Monument is divided into three regions: Zona Tamaya – which contained pictographs, and Zonas Tabali and Talinay – which contained petroglyphs of different styles. We followed the employee’s instruction and went left first, to Zona Tamaya. In retrospect, I can see why he recommended going to the pictographs first. That’s because paint on rock (pictographs) isn’t preserved anywhere near as well as carvings into rock (petroglyphs). We had a very hard time seeing most of the pictographs and never found some of them. Still, it was fun trying. No one had told the ancient people to lay out their drawings and carvings in rows so that, thousands of years later, they’d be easy to follow! Instead we had to wander up and down and boulder scramble to try to find all of the sites.

After moving into Zona Tabali, things got easier. Easier to see, but still not easy to follow. The petroglyphs in Zona Tabali mostly showed depictions of the heads of their leaders while those in Zona Talinay showed entire bodies.

Zona Talinay was definitely the most interesting part of the Monument for us because of the terrain. It was much rockier and required a lot more bouldering and route-finding to see all of the petroglyphs. Mountain goats Todd and Deb were in their element!

After spending several hours exploring the valley, we headed to the small, traditional town of Barraza where a friend had recommended we eat lunch. My sister, Martha, is coming to visit us in about a month so we decided to make a huge sacrifice and try out a potential restaurant for her visit. The restaurant, Cabildo Abierto, was wonderful! Most of the restaurant is outside, under various thatched canopies. Some of the walls have murals painted on them. Other wall glass bottles embedded in them which are filled with various color liquids. There was also an adobe oven. It was a really interesting and beautiful space.

The food was very traditional and the menu was brief and given verbally. You got to choose what filling you wanted for your empanada (cow or goat cheese, mushrooms, merken – a spice, or beef), what main dish you wanted (goat, rabbit, shredded beef or húmitas – sweet-corn tamales), and what side you wanted (rice, pan fried potatoes, french fried, or sliced tomatoes). Todd and I both chose the goat, which was very tasty but time-consuming to separate from the bones and fat. And the empanadas were delicious! We both decided we would be willing to suffer through another lunch here when my sister visits.

To round off the day, we headed up the Río Hurtado valley to the San Pedro de Pichasca National Monument. This monument is known for its dinosaur fossils, which we didn’t know when we drove up. Mostly, we were checking out a possible hiking spot for a different weekend. We didn’t find the start of the hike we were looking for, but the Monument look interesting enough to come back for further exploration on a different weekend.

We left the valley as the sun was disappearing and got home tired, but exhilarated. We’ll definitely be back to explore Río Hurtado next week!