The dataset contains material of the historical biogeographic study of the plant genus Cristaria (Malvacae) in the Atacama Desert. We provide here (1) the time calibrated phylogeny of the family Malvaceae in .tre data format (Cristaria_cp_4Foss_BeastTree.tre). Further (2) we provide two nexus files used for all phylogenetic analysis of the paper. The first nexus file (Cristaria_cp_Master.nex) is the concatenated sequence alignment with character set annotations for the three chloroplast marker (trnK/matK, rpl16, ndhF) as well as for hotspot regions and sequence inversions which were excluded and reverse complemented for analysis. The second nexus file (Cristaria_cp_Master_HSEX_INVREV.nex) is identical to the first one except from the fact that all hotspot regions were excluded and the inversions reverse complemented. This dataset was used for all phylogenetic studies as it is presented here. Finally (3), we provide a combined tree file (Cristaria_cp_RAxML-tree_BS_PP.xtg) including the phylogenetic tree of the Maximum Likelihood analysis (RAxML) with additional posterior probability values from the Bayesian Inference analysis (MrBayes). The tree file can be loaded with the program TreeGraph2 (Ströve