Salar de Uyuni

The Salar de Uyuni is a natural formation created by the desiccation of ancient Pleistocene lakes over tens of thousands of years. Its sacred significance is rooted in Aymara cosmology, which identifies the landscape as the physical creation of the deity Tunupa. Archaeological evidence confirms human sacred engagement with the landscape across the Tiwanaku, Inca, and Chullpa traditions.

In the beginning, there were the mountains, and the mountains were alive.

Tunupa was the greatest among them, a goddess of volcanoes, thunder, and lightning. She married Kusku, and they lived on the high plateau. But Kusku was unfaithful. He fled with Kusina, another mountain, abandoning Tunupa and their nursing child.

Tunupa wept. She wept while breastfeeding, and her tears mixed with her breast milk and flowed out across the Altiplano. The streams of grief and nourishment, mingled together, spread and spread until they covered ten thousand square kilometres of the high plateau. They hardened into salt. The Salar was made.

A variant of the story involves the mountain Yana Pollera, the nearest peak to the salt flat, entangled with both Thunupa and Q'osqo. The details shift between communities, but the core remains: divine love, divine betrayal, and the transformation of grief into landscape. The salt is not a geological curiosity. It is an emotion made mineral.

The geological account tells its own version: ancient Lake Minchin covered this area 30,000 to 42,000 years ago. It became Paleo Lake Tauca, reaching 140 metres deep. Then Lake Coipasa, the youngest, 11,500 to 13,400 years ago. Each lake shrank. Each left behind evaporite deposits of salt. The layers accumulated over millennia, creating the thick halite crust that constitutes the present-day Salar. Both accounts — the mythological and the geological — describe the same transformation: a vast body of water that existed and is gone, leaving behind a white mineral trace of its former presence.