Salar de Uyuni in 3D: See the Mirror Season Before You Book

The largest salt flat on earth lies above 3,600 metres in southwest Bolivia, and for a few months a year it holds a film of rainwater and turns into a mirror. Here is how to explore it in 3D with live Street View, right from your iPhone.

Salar de Uyuni lies in the southwest of Bolivia, on the high plateau the Andes hold between their two ranges, more than 3,600 metres above the sea. It is the largest salt flat on earth: the floor of a lake that dried out and left behind a crust so level that satellites are calibrated against it. From the ground it reads as white to the horizon, with nothing to give the eye a sense of scale.

The journey is the part nobody photographs. Uyuni is an overnight bus or a short flight from La Paz, the air is thin enough to flatten most people on their first day, and the mirror everyone comes for is seasonal. Arrive in the wrong month and you get a hard white plain instead, remarkable in its own way but not the picture you had in mind.

Which is a good reason to look before you book. You can explore Salar de Uyuni today, in full 3D with live Street View, right from your phone.

What makes Salar de Uyuni special

The salar is what a lake leaves behind. A series of prehistoric lakes filled this basin and evaporated, the last of them leaving a salt crust several metres thick in places, floating on brine rich in lithium. It is why the flat now turns up in conversations about batteries as often as about travel.

Because the basin has no outlet, the surface is extraordinarily even. In the dry months the crust hardens into a mosaic of polygons, ridges pushed up along the seams where brine works its way toward the light, and you can drive for an hour without a landmark. In the wet months a film of water spreads across the same ground, finds nowhere to drain, and the flat becomes a sheet of standing water thin enough to mirror the sky.

Out in the middle stands Isla Incahuasi, an outcrop of fossil coral studded with giant cactus. It was an island when this was a lake, and it is an island still, in a sea gone to salt.

How to explore Salar de Uyuni in 3D

This is where MAPAS comes in. Instead of flat photographs and a scattering of pins, you get the basin, its rim of volcanoes and the roads across it in real 3D, with live Street View to step into where coverage reaches.

For a first run, try this order:

1. Search for Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia and switch to 3D so the basin and the ranges around it lift into relief.
2. Pull the camera up and tilt until the whole flat sits in frame, with the volcanoes along its northern rim.
3. Drop to Colchani on the eastern shore, where the gravel road ends and the track runs out onto the salt.
4. Fly west to Isla Incahuasi, circle it low, then step into Street View among the cactus for the view back across the crust.
5. Trace the northern edge toward Tunupa, then follow the southern road down toward the lagoons of the Avaroa reserve.
6. Turn on GPS navigation to follow the same route on the ground when you finally travel.

Beyond the salt flat

• Train Cemetery — rusting steam locomotives on the desert edge of Uyuni town, left behind by the mining railway.
• Colchani — the village on the eastern shore where salt is still raked, dried and bagged largely by hand.
• Tunupa — the volcano on the northern rim, with burial caves on its flank and a climb that puts the whole salar below you.
• Laguna Colorada — south in the Eduardo Avaroa reserve, red with algae and worked by three species of flamingo.
• Sol de Mañana and Laguna Verde — fumaroles and a green mineral lake on the high road toward the Chilean border.

Why the mirror is a matter of season

Photographs of Uyuni show either a white desert or a perfect reflection, and rarely explain how one becomes the other. In 3D the answer is plain. The flat is the floor of a closed basin, fed by rivers off the surrounding cordillera with nowhere to run. Rain falling between roughly December and April spreads a shallow sheet across ground with almost no gradient, and a sheet that thin, on a surface that even, behaves like glass.

The same view shows the trade-off. In a wet year the water can be deep enough that drivers keep to the margins and Incahuasi becomes awkward to reach, so the mirror costs you the crossing. From May to November the salt is hard, you can drive the width of it, and the polygons appear underfoot. They are two different places wearing the same name, and worth choosing between on purpose.

Before you go

For reflections, come between December and April, with January to March the likeliest. For hard salt and the polygon crust, come between May and November. Most visitors reach Uyuni by flight or overnight bus from La Paz, or on a three-day 4x4 crossing from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, and almost everyone goes out onto the flat with a local operator.

Bring sunglasses and sun cream you would consider excessive anywhere else, because the glare arrives from below as well as above. Nights in June and July fall well under freezing. And remember the salar is a workplace as much as a landscape: salt is cut here, tyre tracks last, and nothing you drop breaks down on a surface where nothing grows.

Common questions

When does the salt flat turn into a mirror?

Roughly December to April, and best in the days after heavy rain. It is never guaranteed on a given date: the water evaporates quickly under that sun, and a stiff afternoon wind is enough to break the reflection.

Can I drive onto the salt myself?

It is possible and generally unwise. There are no landmarks, the crust hides soft ground and brine holes near the shore, and salt corrodes a vehicle from underneath. Local drivers know which lines hold in which month, which is most of what you are paying for.

Is MAPAS free to use?

Yes. It is free on the App Store, needs no sign-up before you start exploring, and works on iPhone and iPad.

No altitude headache, no six hours of gravel before the view begins. Just the largest salt flat on earth in three dimensions, with its ring of volcanoes and the track out to the island of cactus, open on any evening.

Open MAPAS and look at the basin first, then decide which of its two seasons is yours.