Vicuña, Chile
San Martín 275
N/A
+56 512670330
Good for kids
Wheelchair-accessible entrance
This place is incredible. Our guide was so knowledgeable and funny! He was passionate and his passion was contagious! What an amazing experience.
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If you are in vicuna or La Serena, Chile a must. Very well explained and have the opportunity to see some stars and learn your way around the celestial sky. Best 7 days after full moon.
Horrible system. This place requires you to reserve tickets in advance, yet you have to go half an hour before your observatory tour starts to pick up your tickets, so far so good? Nope, when you arrive there will be a queue of people and most of them won't have a reservation and the people who work there will take them anyways (in fear of being treated as mean for not taking customers with no reservation) which causes the people with a reservation to wait for around 40 minutes, when they could just sell you the tickets when you make the reservation...or have two queues...or sell them online...unlimited options! We even had an older woman cutting the line twice, taking a very long time and when we had enough and told her to have some respect for other people's time she said "learn to live life...you are young" I guess if you know how to live, skip lines, and have no respect for others maybe go there and you will have a great experience for me it was not. Also the observatory was cheap but you get what you paid for, very crowded and tired tour guides, we where lucky to join an English tour with a great guide but most experiences are not like that.
We really enjoyed the tour. Got to see Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons and many constellations. The guide was very knowledgable and spoke very good English. We also listened to a few presentations which were mind-blowing. It cost CLP 20,000 for two of us including transfer to and from Vicuna. If you then need travel onwards by bus be aware that the tour gets you back between 21:00-21:30 and many of the last buses are at 21:30. We very nearly missed our last bus but asked the transfer to stop near the bus station for us and we just made the bus as it was exiting the station. You have to go to the ticket office that’s near the Torre Bauer in the afternoon to sign up for the tour later that evening. You then return to the office at 18:00 to confirm and pay, weather dependent. At around 18:30 you get the transfer and the tour starts just after 19:00 and finishes around 21:00.
Did a stargazing trip here. Skies weren't particularly dark. Ok if you have very little knowledge of the night sky.
Amazing views of the stars with no light pollution; quite frankly the best observatory for the public in the whole region.
- Do not go here - we paid to look through the big telescope. And the big telescope wasn't working. Besides the telescope not working there was a tired, unfriendly and annoying tour guide. These people are trying to cheat you out of your money and they should be ashamed of themselves. The people writing the fake 5* reviews are even worse. Hope they read this and laugh for taking my money. They make a shame out of other great tours that we did in Chili and give the business a bad name.
as a novice to our night skies the tour at mamalluca was excellent. the skies were very clear and we were lucky that the planets and moon were in good locations for our visit so we had a lot to see. our guide was excellent and the photos by our mobile phone using the manual telescope were outstanding.
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