“The Tarapacá Declaration” draws attention to the urgent need to change how human societies have been using water in the Atacama Desert, based on a historical trajectory spanning several millennia. The Declaration, an initiative that summarizes the results of the CONICYT/PIA, Anillo project SOC1405, is oriented towards civil society and various political entities, aiming to generate technological and cultural changes to halt and mitigate the effects caused by anthropogenic activities in one of the oldest and most arid deserts in the world. In the course of the project, we established the urgent need to sensitize society to the wasteful overuse and misuse of water in the Atacama Desert, a non-renewable resource in relation to the economic scales of extraction of this element that depends, fundamentally, on fossil waters that have accumulated for millennia in the highlands of the Desert. In this way we want to avoid that this scientific knowledge is encapsulated in the universities and to echo the point made by Victoria Castro (2003): that to grow you have to educate.