Uyuni Travel Guide

Isla Incahuasi is a coral reef island stranded in the middle of Salar de Uyuni, rising about 80 metres above the salt and nicknamed the Fish Island for its silhouette. Its slopes bristle with giant column cacti, some claimed to be over 800 years old and taller than 12 metres, a green silhouette against a pure white horizon in every direction. A short path climbs to the summit for a 360-degree view over the empty salt plain, where the only sound is wind. Most tours stop for about an hour; mornings are quieter.

Salar de Uyuni spreads across more than 10,000 square kilometres of Bolivia's high plateau at 3,656 metres, the largest salt flat on Earth and a vast lithium reservoir beneath a salt crust up to 11 metres deep. In the dry season the cracked hexagons glare white under high sun, turning pink and gold at dusk; from December to April a thin sheet of water turns the flats into a flawless mirror of sky. Standard tours leave from Uyuni town in 4x4s, with nights in hotels built of salt blocks.

Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, floods into a mirror in the wet season, reflecting the sky.

The Train Cemetery is a high-altitude train graveyard near Uyuni Salt Flat, Bolivia, with abandoned 19th-century steam locomotives in the desert.

Volcano Uturuncu rises about 6,008 m on the Altiplano of southwestern Bolivia near the Chilean border, one of the country's highest climbable volcanoes.

Isla del Pescado, the 'fish island' of the Salar de Uyuni, rises like a stony atoll from the world's largest salt flat in southwest Bolivia. It was once a coral reef beneath a prehistoric lake; today its slopes are crowded with giant cacti, some ten metres tall and more than a thousand years old. Climb the short trail to the summit for a 360-degree panorama of dazzling white salt stretching to the horizon. Virtually every dry-season 4x4 crossing of the salar makes a stop here, making it a defining image of Uyuni.