Caracoles was a small, but important town dedicated to the mining of the silver resources located in Carmen Gloria Bravo Quezada, ''La flor del desierto. Caracoles y su impacto sobre la economía chilena'', Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Achivos y Museos, Santiago, Chile. in the

Atacama desert The Atacama Desert ( es, Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,600 km (990 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains. The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in th ...

. Its accurate location led to dispute between the Bolivian and the Chilean Governments because the

Boundary Treaty of 1866 between Chile and Bolivia The Boundary Treaty of 1866 between Chile and Bolivia, also called the Mutual Benefits Treaty, was signed in Santiago de Chile on August 10, 1866, by the Chilean Foreign Affairs Minister Alvaro Covarrubias and the Bolivian Plenipotentiary in Santi ...

ordered that tax incomes from the region between the 23°S and the 25°S should be divided in equal parts. Negotiations led to the Corral-Lindsay agreement, which was not ratified by Bolivia, but later both countries signed the Boundary Treaty of 1874 between Chile and Bolivia which eliminated the "Mutual Benefits Zone" between the 23°S and the 25°S parallels. See location of Caracoles in a map of Antofagasta in 1895.

References

{{reflist Populated places in Antofagasta Province

See also

References