Nevado Tres Cruces National Park

Lagoons, salt deposits and luring summits in a cordillera with a beautiful setting, such is the natural decoration of the Nevado Tres Cruces National Park, which was created to protect the delicate ecosystems of the Andes, habitat of an intense native fauna proper of the highlands close to the sky, with meagre vegetation though imposing for their untamed greatness.

The Park is located in a pre-cordilleran area and it has an extension of 59.09 hectares. It presents a geographical semblance on which deserts and Andean salt deposits, along with important wetlands that congregate an attractive flora and fauna, with species adapted to the rigors and austerity proper of places over 3500 metres above sea level, are predominant.

The most attractive sectors in this protected area located in the Commune of Tierra Amarilla, Province of Copiapó (III Atacama Region), are the Salt Deposit of Maricunga and the Santa Rosa and Negro Francisco Lagoons. The Permanent Committee for the Convention of Wetlands, seated in Berna Switzerland, declared the last two RAMSAR areas in 1966.

This declaration as RAMSAR sites is in recognition to the international importance of both Lagoons on the conservation of aquatic birds, which is justified because 62 species have been registered at both of them, mostly from the highlands.

The most outstanding and renowned amongst them are three types of flamingos, being one of them the Andean flamingo (Phoenicoparrus andinus), Horned Coot (Fulica cornuta), Andean Goose. piuquenes (Chloephaga melanoptera) and the Patagonian crested ducks (Lophonetta specularioides), amongst others.