Centro Turístico Capel

The day trades the Pacific for the Andes in a single long arc — pisco country in the morning, one of the highest border crossings in the world by midday, and a high-desert Argentine valley by late afternoon. It is a full day in every sense, but it builds well: the Elqui Valley gives you a reason to move slowly through the first half before the road demands your full attention.

Into the Elqui Valley

The 8:00 am departure from La Serena follows Ruta 41 east, leaving the coast almost immediately as the road angles inland toward the cordillera. Within fifteen kilometres the landscape shifts — coastal scrub giving way to irrigated terraces of papaya and the small-leafed muscat vines that supply the valley's pisco distilleries. The Elqui is narrow and improbably fertile, a ribbon of green pressed between bare brown hills with almost no flat ground to spare.

Centro Turístico Capel — Vicuña

Vicuña sits about 60 km from La Serena, and the Centro Turístico Cooperativa Capel — located about 2 km southeast of the town centre — is the first stop of the day, arriving just after 9:00 am. Note that tours begin at 10:00 am; there may be a short wait on arrival, which is a reasonable excuse to walk the grounds and look at the surrounding vineyard landscape before the doors open. The Cooperativa Capel is the largest pisco producer in the Elqui Valley, and the 45-minute guided tour covers the full production process — fermentation tanks, copper stills, the barrel ageing room — ending with a tasting and the gift of a small glass. The process shares its early stages with winemaking (Capel uses Muscat grapes grown by cooperative members throughout the valley) but diverges sharply at distillation, where the fermented must is double-distilled into the clear spirit that becomes pisco. The tasting at the end is the point: try the pisco puro alongside a premixed sour and judge for yourself. Tours run in English and Spanish; there is no need to book in advance.

After Capel, the fuel stop at the Petrobras station in Vicuña is the practical moment to stock provisions for lunch — Vicuña has a supermarket and is the last town with reliable supplies before the climb.