It is located in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile on Cerro Paranal at 2,635 m (8,645 ft) altitude, 120 km (70 mi) south of Antofagasta.

Two major new facilities are under construction nearby: the southern part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array gamma-ray telescope (not owned by ESO) will be sited in the grounds 10 km south-east of Paranal; while ESO's future E-ELT will be on the nearby peak of Cerro Armazones 20 km east of Paranal, and will share some of the base facilities.

The Survey Telescope, VST, is immediately adjacent to the VLT and seen in between two of its units, while VISTA is located on a secondary peak, some 1,500 m away in the background (see image).

It consists of an array of twelve 0.2-meter robotic telescopes with a very large field of view of 96 square degrees or several hundred times the area of the full moon.

The survey aims to discover numerous super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets around nearby stars, using transit photometry to detect them.

NGTS is managed by a partnership of seven academic institutions from Chile, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and its design is based on the SuperWASP project.

The observatory's facilities were used to stage the Pacific Alliance's fourth summit in June 2012, formally launching the organization.