Exploring Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Mirror in Bolivia

Exploring Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Mirror in Bolivia (Image: Canva)

Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, located in the expansive highlands of southwestern Bolivia. The large natural phenomenon occupies more than 10,500 square kilometres, and it is located at an altitude of approximately 3,650-3,700 metres (above sea level). Salar de Uyuni is a unique location because it turns out to be an ideal mirror during rainy seasons. When the rainwater is scattered out thinly upon its flat crust of salt, the surface reflects sky, clouds and horizon so accurately that visitors believe they stand between earth and heaven.

The formation of Salar de Uyuni took place thousands of years ago when a number of prehistoric lakes dried up. With time, all that was left was a crust of salt over a brine-filled basin. There are exceptionally flat crusts: the real rise and fall in most places is within one metre on the whole surface. This flatness is essential, not only to appeal to tourists, but also scientifically and technologically, as the smoothing of satellites, such as the calibration of satellites, exploits their smooth reflective surface. During dry seasons, the salt crust becomes polygonal tiles of salt, and they are stark white and geometrically regular.

Salar de Uyuni has a reflective magic which is put to the fore during the wet season (around December to April). The water forms a thin coat on the salt crust, and in calm weather, the layer of water serves as a mirror reflecting skies and producing surrealistic effects. The consequences are surreal: the tracks of the jeeps are erased by the footsteps of travellers, there is no clear division of the horizons, and there is almost no way to define what the sky and the land are. The reflection attracts those who give the mirror a second glance, and those who are adventurous and dreamers.

Salar de Uyuni is a resourceful place, not only in terms of visual display. It covers one of the largest deposits in the world of lithium, in the brine of its salt crust. Salt production is also going on at a very small scale. Life adapts to this tough world: tough flamingos come to visit it, giant cacti cover bare islands, which are floating on the salt flat, and primitive villages are the entrance gateways to tourists.

To the visitors, it is very different depending on the time of the day. During the dry season, the landscape is less challenging to drive through, 4x4 cars are buoyed upon the salt crust, and the horizon is wide and panoramic. During the wet season, the mobility will be low, but the photo opportunity will be extraordinary, mirrors, reflections and other worldly light. Salar de Uyuni is not just a piece of nature; it is a meeting in the size, emptiness and the beauty that appears when the earth and sky meet.