Atacama Desert

The incredibly desolate Atacama Desert. It is so dry here that not even cactus will grow. Arica, a major city in the desert gets an average of 0.02 inches of rain a year. By way of comparison, Death Valley, the driest place in the United States gets 118 times more rain. It would take more than one hundred years in Arica to get the amount of rain that Death Valley gets in one year. Although sometimes listed as such in some almanacs, Arica isn't even in the driest part of the desert. Some towns in the vicinity of San Pedro and Calama were settled more than 400 years ago and it still hasn't even rained once since the towns were settled. Even in the larger towns and cities, many children have only read about rain in school books and have never seen it.