We compiled 31 temperature–depth profiles to reconstruct the ground surface temperature of the last 500 years in northern Chile. They suggest that the region experienced a cooling from 1850 to 1980 followed by a warming of 1.9 K. The cooling could coincide with a cooling interval in 1960. The warming is greater than that of proxy reconstructions for nearby regions and model simulations. These differences could be due to differences in spatial and temporal resolution between data and models.