La Serena was founded in 1544 on the orders of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, laid out by his captain Juan Bohón as Villanueva de La Serena. Its purpose was strategic: a coastal waypoint to keep open the sea link between newly founded Santiago and the seat of Spanish power in Lima. The young settlement did not last. In January 1549 an indigenous uprising overran and burned it, killing nearly every Spaniard there. Valdivia had it rebuilt the same year, on the spot where the Plaza de Armas still stands, and rededicated to Saint Bartholomew, who remains the city's patron. To stand in that square today is to stand on ground that has been the heart of the city through destruction and rebirth alike.

The La Serena that visitors photograph owes its unified look to one man's vision. President Gabriel González Videla, a son of the city, launched the Plan Serena between 1948 and 1952, a sweeping program of investment and redevelopment that gave the city its now-famous neocolonial face. New buildings were required to wear Spanish Colonial Revival dress, blending with the genuinely old churches and monuments so that the historic core reads as a single harmonious whole. The plan reached beyond La Serena to the wider province, including the port of Coquimbo next door. The result is a townscape that feels both ancient and intentional, a place that chose its own identity and built it in stone and white stucco.

Summer transforms La Serena. It becomes one of Chile's favorite vacation destinations, drawing crowds to some of the longest beaches in the country, stretches of sand you could walk for the better part of a day. The city is famous for its papayas, grown locally and turned into juice sold from market stalls all over town. Inland lies the Elqui Valley, the cradle of pisco, the grape brandy that is Chile's national spirit; travelers drink it as a tart pisco sour or simply mixed with cola as a piscola. Off the coast, tour boats go looking for whales, dolphins, penguins, and sea lions, and in rare wet springs the surrounding desert erupts into the spectacle of wildflowers known as the desert in bloom.

What draws astronomers to this corner of Chile is the same thing that draws sunseekers: the sky. The Elqui Valley above La Serena has some of the cleanest, driest, most transparent air on Earth, and the region bristles with observatories, several of which open their domes to nighttime visitors who ride up from the city. Between the stargazing, the beaches, the pisco, and the colonial streets, the city is also a base camp. The University of La Serena and several private universities fill the center with students through the year, and the city serves as the seat of one of Chile's Catholic archdioceses and the economic capital of its region. Travelers push north to the islands of the Humboldt penguin reserve at Punta de Choros, or a few hours south to Fray Jorge, the fog-fed rainforest stranded in the desert. La Serena, the old sentinel of the coast, has become the gateway to the wonders around it.