Explore Potosí: the Salar de Uyuni & Cerro Rico

A thin sheet of standing water during the rainy season turns the Salar de Uyuni's surface into a near-perfect mirror, doubling the sky in a way few other landscapes on Earth can match — a phenomenon of the flat's sheer size and flatness rather than any special mineral property. Isla Incahuasi, a rocky outcrop rising from the middle of the flat, is covered in cacti that grow just one centimetre a year and reach up to twelve metres tall, with a short walking trail to a panoramic viewpoint over the white expanse in every direction. Near Uyuni town, the Train Cemetery gathers the rusting locomotives of a nineteenth-century railway built to export minerals to the Pacific coast and abandoned before it was ever finished — an oddly photogenic dead end that most tours visit on the way out to the flat.

Potosí, a UNESCO World Heritage city at over 4,000 metres, was built directly on the silver wealth of the Cerro Rico, the mountain that financed the Spanish Empire for two centuries and once made this one of the largest, richest cities on the planet. The Casa de la Moneda, the old royal mint, preserves the colonial minting machinery and coinage from that era in what's considered one of South America's finest colonial museums. The Cerro Rico is still worked today by mining cooperatives, and guided tours — led largely by former miners through the same tunnels — are physically demanding, genuinely hot and dusty, and offer a real look at working conditions and mining traditions, including offerings left for El Tío, the underworld figure miners still honour underground. Best arranged with an established operator in town rather than at the mine gate.

Uyuni town, not Potosí city, is where Salar tours actually start — reached from La Paz by an overnight bus (around ten to twelve hours) or a short flight. One-day tours cover the salt flat, Incahuasi and the Train Cemetery; the fuller three-day circuits push on into the altiplano to Laguna Colorada, Laguna Verde and the Sol de Mañana geysers. Some three-day operators end the tour at the Chilean border rather than looping back to Uyuni, a genuinely useful option for travellers continuing on to San Pedro de Atacama rather than backtracking the way they came.