Finally, we made it. We passed Chile, we experienced long journeys on Bolivian night buses to the sound of Andean music played at full volume, we survived the flight on the propeller airplane that took us to the Amazon pampas, we traveled on small buses in the company of the most varied characters, but finally we made it. We have reached the main destination of the whole journey. The one that, when we used to read about it in the guide, the only thing we could do is imagining it: the Salar of Uyuni.
The Salar of Uyuni is a huge salt desert located in the provinces of Potosí and Oruro, near the town of Uyuni, in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, at 3,650 meters above sea level. To find out about its formation, we need to go back 40,000 years ago. The plateau on which the desert was located had no outlets, so all the water coming from the surrounding mountains was channeled there, thus creating the Minchin lake. Because of the high salinity, all the water hit by the strong rays of the Andean sun evaporated and formed two lakes and two salty deserts: the Salar de Coipassa and the gigantic Salar de Uyuni, one of the most incredible places in the world.
More fascinating, instead, is the story of the formation of the desert according to the Aymara legend, whose protagonists were the giants Kusina, Kusku and Tunupa, which are the names of the surrounding mountains.
Tunupa and Kusku were married, but the latter betrayed his wife with Kusina: Tunupa cried so much that she filled the whole expanse with her salty tears, giving rise to the salt desert.
A slight different version of the legend claims that, instead, the tears of Tunupa gushed after being abandoned by her husband Kusku with their newborn son; during every breastfeeding, Tunupa cried a river of tears that, together with mother’s milk, formed the Salar.
To date, it is estimated that the Salar de Uyuni, which covers an area of about 200 square kilometers, contains 10 billion tons of salt, from which less than 25,000 tons are extracted annually. It is formed by approximately 11 layers with a depth ranging from 2 and 10 meters while, in the most inner and central part, the lake is 120 meters deep.
