Founded 1544 — Chile's second-oldest city and a Spanish colonial template
La Serena was founded by Juan Bohón on the orders of conquistador Pedro de Valdivia on 26 August 1544, making it the second-oldest city in Chile after Santiago (founded 1541). The original settlement was destroyed in a Diaguita uprising in 1549, then refounded by Francisco de Aguirre in 1549 under the name San Bartolomé de La Serena. The city's enduring urban signature is its colonial-era ecclesiastical density — 29 historic churches inside the city grid, including the Iglesia Catedral (1844 on a 1755 foundation), Iglesia San Francisco (1627, the oldest surviving church), and Iglesia Santo Domingo. The 'Plan Serena' urban renewal launched by President Gabriel González Videla (himself a serenense) in the late 1940s codified the neocolonial architectural style that defines the historic centre today: white stucco walls, red-tile roofs, balconies, and stone window-frames. Walk the four-block grid around Plaza de Armas before any kite session — it's the visual context that explains why La Serena reads as a colonial city first and a beach city second.
Diaguita heritage — the indigenous layer beneath the colonial overlay
Before Spanish arrival, the Coquimbo Region was the southern frontier of the Diaguita cultural complex, a sophisticated agricultural society known across northwest Argentina and the Norte Chico of Chile for terraced farming, irrigation engineering, and a distinctive polychrome ceramic tradition (the Diaguita-Chilena style, c. 1000–1536 CE — black, white, and red geometric patterns on duck-shaped jars and bowls). The Inca empire absorbed the Chilean Diaguita briefly in the 1470s before Spanish conquest dismantled both layers. The Museo Arqueológico de La Serena holds the country's primary Diaguita ceramic collection — go before you assume the region's history starts in 1544. Diaguita identity is officially recognised by the Chilean state (CONADI registration since 2006), and small contemporary Diaguita communities continue in the Huasco and Elqui valleys inland.
Elqui Valley pisco country and Gabriela Mistral's birthplace
Drive 80 km inland from La Serena up the Río Elqui and you enter the Valle del Elqui — Chile's primary pisco-production region and a designated Denominación de Origen since 1931 (one of the world's oldest spirit DOs, predating most appellation systems). Pisco Elqui town, Vicuña, and Paihuano are the named villages of the valley; Capel and ABA are the cooperative producers most likely to host visiting kiters between sessions. Vicuña is also the birthplace of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga — the poet better known as Gabriela Mistral, who in 1945 became the first Latin American author and the first woman from the Spanish-speaking world to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her childhood home in Vicuña is now the Museo Gabriela Mistral; her grave is in Montegrande, 25 km further up the valley. The Elqui detour is a half-day, and it reframes La Serena as the coastal endpoint of a far older valley culture.
World's clearest skies — astrotourism, observatories, and the Atacama threshold
The Coquimbo Region sits at the southern edge of the Atacama Desert sky belt, which atmospheric scientists rate as having the clearest, driest, and most stable night skies on Earth — the reason the European Southern Observatory built La Silla (1969) and the AURA consortium built Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (1967) within 100 km of La Serena. La Silla operates Chile's first major scientific telescope and remains an active research site; Cerro Tololo runs daytime tours from La Serena and free Saturday-morning visits with prior booking. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly LSST) on Cerro Pachón, ~80 km southeast, began first-light operations in 2025 and is now mapping the entire southern sky every three nights. Mamalluca Observatory near Vicuña offers public night-tours nightly. Astrotourism is officially Chile's fastest-growing tourism segment — a no-wind morning is well-spent at an observatory, and a full-moon kite trip is the only window when the sky-tour calendar goes dark.