There is a place on Earth that does not seem like this planet. A visible white spot from the space that has the same surface as the Navarra Foral Community, 10,000 million tons of salt and the world’s largest reserves of the precious lithium. Is that they would justify a trip to that country alone. Salar is the fund of former prehistoric lakes that existed more than 40,000 years ago and which is located between the departments of Potosí and Oruro, in the highland region of the Andes Cordillera, about 3,700 meters altitude, in a remote area to four hours of car from Potosí and eight from La Paz (although since 2011 it also has airport).
Even so, more than 300,000 visitors arrive every year to tour it and take pictures in an unreal scenery. A transfer of tourists that has revitalized the two neighboring populations by salaring in this lost and rough corner of the Bolivian highlands: Uyuni and Colchani herself. The city of Uyuni was born in 1889 linked to the construction of a railroad that linked the Bolivian mines of Pulacayo with the Chilean port of Antofagasta and through which tons of saltpeter, gold, silver, copper and tin circulated for decades.
Although Uyuni gives Salar’s name and houses most services, the most used and close access point is Colchani, a small village 20 kilometers from the first. The salt can be visited on your own, with your own vehicle: there is no entrance door or ticket sale; It is free. But I would not advise you to do it like this: getting into a flat and white desert 150 kilometers long without knowledge is a recklessness. The most advisable thing is to hire an organized excursion in Uyuni, or at least, a car with a driver who knows how to enter, and above all, of that salted and endless crust.
Organized excursions are picking you through your hotel at about 10 am. First they take you to visit although it still works and spend sporadically, the iron line to the Pacific was gradually falling into oblivion and today more than 100 units, between cars of all kinds and locomotives, survive to the time and oxide in the secondary roads of Uyuni, forming the largest cemetery of trains in the world. There is also a very interesting rail museum.
Then they take you to a modest interpretation center where they explain to you and then, and final The Galaxies War or of Dune.
It passes first through an old salt hotel, which closed for environmental reasons, along with which there is a great monument – act, of course, of salt – there is also a memorial with half -world flags that the visitors themselves leave. And from there and depending on the time, the excursion continues to one side or another.
The most spectacular time to visit Uyuni is the rainy season, from December until the last week of March or early April. Then, a layer of four water fingers covers a good part of the lagoon (eye, essential to use rubber boots) and the famous mirror effect that we have seen in a thousand photos is generated, with duplicate clouds in the sky and the earth, impossible colors and sunsets that surround you 360 degrees. The problem is that this same layer of water prevents going very far and you will leave many corners of the salt without visiting.
In return, there is greater mobility inside and you can visit the islands that emerge from the saline crust, such as Incahuasi, an islet of 26 square kilometers in the central area where giant cactus grows – the Puna cardon – up to 10 meters high.
At noon they prepare a country lunch with portable tables and chairs (at least, so did the company with which I hired) and you like to eat surrounded by the strangest landscape in which you have done it in your life. Then you visit a salt sculpture park made by it is the magical moment of the Uyuni salar, especially in the rainy season. When the mirror effect mixes heaven and earth on a palette of roses, ocher and blue in which you do not know if you are standing or head.
But Uyuni is not the only lamina of mineral waters in these plains. In Chile is the equally famous Salar de Atacama. And in the border area of both countries there are other high -Andean wetlands such as La Laguna Blanca, La Laguna Colorada or La Laguna Verde, all declared Ramsar spaces and with an extraordinary collection of Avifauna, especially large floods of flamingos, geese and Andean seagulls, American hills, owls and all kinds of ducks. The three, together with arid areas such as the Dalí or Siloli desert, can be visited on excursions of two to four days from Uyuni.
