Travel Guide Salar De Atacama

With its 300,000 hectares, the Salar de Atacama is the largest salt basin in Chile. It is a lake covered with a layer of salt, in some places dotted with lagoons. The play of light on the salt, on the surrounding mountains, makes it look like an immense painter's palette in permanent mutation. Its subsoil contains 40% of the world's lithium reserves and is increasingly attracting the interest of mining operations that threaten the conservation of these landscapes that are as magical as they are fragile. This coveted white gold has already begun to be lost in the salar: the lagoons are shrinking and the wild population of pink flamingos is in sharp decline.