Desert Oasis?

An ambitious Chilean hotelier tries to woo tourists to its palace in the sand.

"IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME," THE MYSTERIOUS VOICE urged A farmer in the movie "Field of Dreams" to build a baseball diamond to lure legendary players back to life. A similar story of faith is occurring in the world's driest region at the base of the Andes. Last October, explora, which insists on its lower-case "e," opened a five-star, $20 million luxury hotel in the Atacama desert in hopes of attracting wealthy tourists to the remote, high-altitude town (2,443 meters above sea level) of San Pedro de Atacama.

"Nobody in Chile has ever understood what we are doing'" says German del Sol, the architect of the two-hotel chain. "Every Santiago tourist company said we would go broke in a year.

Del Sol is referring to the company's first venture: a $7 million, 30-room structure that opened in 1993 in the windswept Patagonia national park of Torres del Paine. It now has an annual occupancy rate of 45%--in an area that averages 11%--with reservations into the year 2002.

Eco gold mine. In fact, the Atacama hotel has gotten off to a propitious start, attracting scores of tourists from the United States, Spain, Brazil, Germany and France. In recent months, it has been featured on the Discovery Channel and in such prestigious U.S. publications as Conde Nast Traveler, which recently placed it on its 1999 "Hot List" of world hotels, the only pick from Latin America.

Explora executives are pinning their hopes on the popularity of eco-tourism, the largest growing segment of the tourist trade. In Atacama, they see an eco gold mine in salt lakes, hot springs, craters, snow-capped volcanoes, steaming geysers, pre-Incan ruins and sand dunes rising many meters high. Wildlife includes flamingos, guanacos, vicuna and an Andean rabbit called a vizcacha. 'The hotel is not the star, the destination is," del Sol insists.

Del Sol, who recently left explora because of "creative differences" with the hotel's owner, juice tycoon Pedro Ibanez, founded the business in 1989 to bring five-star accommodations to Chile's most isolated regions.

It took Del Sol five years to finish the Patagonia hotel and two years to build the 52-room Atacama hotel, which he says captures the "spirit of the desert:' He used bricks made of volcanic rock, converted cisterns into swimming pools and surrounded the structure with typical Atacama adobe walls. Shepherds crisscross the hotel's 17 hectares herding their sheep and llamas.

But make no mistake: The hotel is aimed at attracting high-powered business types who yearn to escape their busy lives to revel in nature. The Atacama Hotel is a tad more expensive than its Patagonia counterpart, with a double room fetching $1,296 per person for three nights ($1,858 single) and $2,441 for a week ($3,534 single). This includes full board and daily guided explorations by jeep, horse, mountain bike or hiking.

"The hotel has great potential as an executive retreat:' says Tim Vanderhoof, an adventure-travel consultant for the North Carolina-based Al Fresco Corporation, who recently toured the area along with 25 other American travel agents and consultants. Ann Marie Cowchok, a Washington D.C.-based sales manager for LanChile Airlines, agrees: Explora is for people who have been to a lot of places [and] want something different but still want luxury"

Luxury abounds in the middle of this desert: French chef, Jacuzzi tubs, saunas, masseuse, bed linens from Barcelona and Chilean wine from a private vineyard.

Extravagance for naught? Hector Ochoa, owner of the San Pedro de Atacama-based Ochoa Turismo travel agency, believes such extravagance may be for naught since the city's already-anemic tourism has tailed off in recent years, amounting to only 4,000 visitors in 1998. "The yearly costs of operating any kind of hotel here are enormous:' Ochoa says.

Indeed, Sao Pedro de Atacama has never been a tourist mecca, even for Chileans. "The typical Chilean would rather go to Europe than see his own country," admits Marianne Carey, explora's communications director.

Instead, Atacama tourism draws a small but steady stream of U.S. and European backpackers, who discovered San Pedro de Atacama--a town of 2,000 inhabitants--in the late 1970s. Founded by Spanish conquistadores in 1557, the 34,000-acre oasis is characterized by dusty streets, cheap inns and restaurants, and an archeology museum. The life's work of a Belgian priest named Gustavo Le Paige, who died in 1980, the museum's 500,000 artifacts include Incan gold ornaments and a 1,300-year-old mummy, well-preserved in the desert's dry soil.

While explora waits to see if its desert gamble pays off, it is planning two more outback hotels: one on Chiloe Island in Chile's southern lake district and another on Easter Island, a Chilean possession located 2,274 miles from the mainland and known for its mysterious stone figures built by an ancient Polynesian culture. "We don't care about developed areas:' explora Director Antonio Rollan says. "We look only for unique places:'

Meanwhile, del Sol has found new backers and is busy drawing up plans to build six explora-type hotels in the next 10 years. These include ventures in Cuzco, Peru, Bolivia's Beni Amazon region and Easter Island, where he could wind up competing for upscale tourists with his ex-partners.