Strange Places – SALAR DE UYUNI
At 4,085 square miles in size Salar de Uyuni is the biggest “salt flat” in the world. What is even more remarkable is that it is over 3,500 metres above sea level and is the world’s most important future source of Lithium containing as much as 70% of all known reserves. It is also incredibly flat and people have been known to experience a form of vertigo and visual disorientation when looking across this vast and desolate vista. It covers a lake said to be up to twenty metres deep and was once part of a vast lake some 40,000 years ago before the effects of a series of Ice ages changed the topography. The Aymara, the indigenous people of the Western Andes have a legend that the Salar (Salt Flat) was created when the Giantess Tunupa and her baby were abandoned and cried so that her tears mixed with breast-milk creating the lake. As such, there is a local movement to have the area renamed Salar de Tunupa. This remarkable image displayed above is accredited to Luca Galuzzi (2007) – a truly extraordinary photographer from Italy.
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