Arica

International boundaries tend in time to become the most significant of all geo? graphical divides. In terms of man's varying response t he e viro ment, contrasted development by contiguous States of physically-similar areas is often abruptly revealed in their border settlements while, in addition, frontiers focus quite sharply the extent to which total national territory is effectively organized. One of the most dynamic, if lesser known, growing points in South America during recent years has been the port of Arica,x northern desert outpost on Chile's 2500-mile Pacific seaboard. Located in the triple frontier with Peru and Bolivia, Arica's dominant function as a transit port for these two countries has always served to emphasize its own isolation from the rest of Chile. Without any railway south through the desert to the main centres of the Chilean heartland, indeed until recent months without a good road even as far as Iquique, Arica has relied solely on the coastwise connection to the middle zone, inevitably strained by time and distance (Fig. 1). The Atacama coast itself concedes few opportunities for port development, denying rather than facilitating contact between sea and land. For hundreds of monotonous miles, the Coast Range (El Sistema Cordillerano de la Costa) forms a barren wall between approximately 3000 feet and 6000 feet, plunging steeply into the Pacific and slashed only occasionally by ravines like those of Vitor and Camarones. The narrow marine benches which provide opportunity for ledge settlement, as at Antofagasta, are comparatively rare. About 12 miles from Arica, however, north of the massive bulk of Cerro Camaraca, the formidable barrier becomes more subdued until, under the blunt sandstone headland of El Morro, the interior pampa, locally known as Pampa sin Nombre, is permitted to extend uninterruptedly to the sea and form the Arica coast plain. Here during the Spanish colonial period the small port was developed on an existing Indian site in the middle of the sixteenth century. After the independence of South America in the early nineteenth century, Arica was inherited by the republic of Peru, which then extended its claims into Atacama as far as the Loa. This river, the only permanent stream south of the Lluta to cross the desert, formed the traditional southern boundary of Peru; while before the War of the Pacific (1879-83) changed so much of the political map of South America's west coast, Bolivia's thinly-peopled Litoral province lay between Peru and Chile, thus interposing an additional national claim to more than 200 miles of the Pacific seaboard

Archaeology · Biology · Desert (philosophy · Economic geography · Frontier · Geography · Political science · Transition (genetics · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Geography and Environmental Studies in Latin America · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

• Government Planning and the Location of the Motor Vehicle Industry in Chile

  Open Access•Robert N Gwynne•Tijdschrift voor Economische en…•1978

  Add to list