Like other observatories in this region, La Silla is far from sources of light pollution and, like the Paranal Observatory—home to the Very Large Telescope—it has some of the darkest night skies on Earth.

Following the decision in 1963 to approve Chile as the site for the ESO observatory,[3] scouting parties were sent to various locations to assess their suitability.

The site that was decided upon was La Silla in the southern part of the Atacama Desert, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile and at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Besides being government property, it had the added benefits of being in a dry, flat and easily accessible area, yet isolated and remote from any artificial light and dust sources.

Originally named the Cinchado, it was renamed La Silla ("the saddle" in Spanish) after its saddle-like shape.

[4] On October 30, 1964, the contracts were signed and an area of 627 square kilometres (242.1 sq mi) was purchased the following year.

On 25 March 1969, the ESO site at La Silla was finally formally inaugurated by President Eduardo Frei Montalva.

The telescope hosts HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, the world's foremost exoplanet hunter.

The optimized airflow, the thermal controls, and the active optics give the excellent image quality of the NTT.

However, due to a new agreement between the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and ESO, the instrument is operated by MPG until the end of September 2016.

[18][19] The telescope hosts three instruments: the 67-million pixel Wide Field Imager with a field of view as large as the full Moon, which has taken many amazing images of celestial objects; GROND, the Gamma-Ray Burst Optical/Near-Infrared Detector, which chases the afterglows of the most powerful explosions in the Universe, known as gamma-ray bursts; and the high-resolution spectrograph, FEROS, used to make detailed studies of stars.

[20] MPG's 2.2-metre telescope in La Silla also has a twin brother located at the Calar Alto Observatory in southern Spain.

Since 1987, the ESO La Silla Observatory has also played an important role in the study and follow-up of the nearest recent supernova, SN 1987A.