Salar de Uyuni

The Salar de Uyuni covers roughly 10,000 square kilometers of Bolivia's high Andean plateau, making it the largest salt flat on Earth by a wide margin, formed from the slow evaporation of prehistoric Lake Minchin over thousands of years, leaving behind a crust of salt in places several meters thick.

Its most famous feature only appears seasonally: during the wet season, roughly December through April, rainwater collects in a thin sheet across the flat surface, turning it into an enormous natural mirror. The reflection is precise enough that photos taken here regularly look manipulated, with visitors and vehicles appearing to float in an unbroken sky.

The rest of the year, the salt flat dries into a cracked, stable white expanse, which enables a completely different kind of photography — the perfectly flat, featureless horizon makes the classic forced-perspective trick photos, where a person appears to be standing on a giant's hand or stepping out of a tiny box, genuinely easy to pull off without special equipment.

Incahuasi Island, a rocky outcrop rising from the middle of the flat, is the exposed peak of an ancient volcano now stranded in salt instead of water, covered in giant cacti that can grow over a meter per century, meaning some of the tallest specimens here, reaching 12 meters, are estimated to be well over 1,000 years old.

Beneath the visible salt crust sits something considerably more valuable to the modern economy: an estimated significant portion of the world's known lithium reserves, embedded in the brine layer below. Bolivia has been developing extraction infrastructure to tap those reserves, a real economic dimension to the salt flat that exists well outside its role as a photogenic tourist destination.