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Valle de la Luna (Chile)
Valley of the Moon (Valle de la Luna) is located 13 kilometers west of San Pedro in the Cordillera de la Sal, in the Atacama desert of Chile. It has various stone and sand formations which have been created through the centuries by floods and wind and has also given it an impressive range of color and texture, looking somewhat similar to the surface of the moon.
In Valle de la Luna, there are dry lakes where the composition of salt makes a white covering layer of the area. It presents diverse saline outcrops which appear like man-made sculptures. There are also a great variety of caverns.
Valle de la Luna is a part of the Reserva Nacional los Flamencos and was declared a Nature Sanctuary in 1982 for its great natural beauty and strange lunar landscape, from where in inherits it's name. It is one of the most famous attractions of Chile.
The valley is also considered one of the driest places on earth, as some areas have not received a single drop of rain in hundreds of years. A prototype for a Mars rover was tested there by scientists because of the valley's dry and forbidding terrains.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Valle de la Luna (Chile)
