The Most Beautiful Places in Bolivia
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Bolivia are Laguna Colorada, Tiwanaku and Salar de Uyuni. The list covers 8 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Most of Bolivia's great sights lie on the Altiplano, a high plateau between two ranges of the Andes at around 3,600 metres and more. Volcanoes, mineral-rich lakes and dry winds give it colours found almost nowhere else: white salt, red and green water, ochre desert. The same plateau was the heartland of one of the oldest Andean civilisations, long before the Inca reached it.
Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, a white plain so level that a film of rainwater turns it into a mirror of the sky. In its middle, Isla Incahuasi rises as a rocky island covered in giant columnar cacti, and at the edge of the town of Uyuni rusting locomotives lie in the train cemetery where they were abandoned in the mid-20th century. Further south the lakes take over: Laguna Colorada is stained red by algae and sediment and visited by flamingos, while Laguna Verde, at the foot of the Licancabur volcano, turns green with dissolved minerals. In the desert between them, the wind-eroded Árbol de Piedra balances on a thin stem of rock.
The archaeology is no less striking. Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca, was the centre of a culture that flourished in the first millennium AD, and its Gateway of the Sun is carved from a single block of stone. In the eastern foothills, El Fuerte de Samaipata is a whole sandstone hill carved with channels, niches and figures, used as a ceremonial centre by successive peoples.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laguna Colorada | Lake | |
| 2 | Tiwanaku | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | |
| 4 | Laguna Verde | Lake | |
| 5 | El Fuerte de Samaipata | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 6 | Árbol de Piedra | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Isla Incahuasi | Island | |
| 8 | Uyuni Train Cemetery | Abandoned railway |
01 Laguna Colorada
Bolivia22.199° S 67.781° W
Image by TravelCoffeeBook from Pixabay Laguna Colorada is barely a lake in depth — under a meter across roughly 60 square kilometers — but it packs an unusual amount going on in that shallow water.
Did you know? It was listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1990; in 2009 the Los Lípez site was enlarged from about 513 to more than 14,000 square kilometres.
02 Tiwanaku
Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Keyan Alejandro · CC BY 4.0 Tiwanaku, on the high plain south of Lake Titicaca, was the centre of one of the great civilisations of the Andes. The city grew in the first centuries AD, flourished from about 375 to 700, and at its peak covered some 4 square km with a population of well over 10,000.
Did you know? The Gateway of the Sun was carved from a single block of about 10 tonnes; European explorers in the mid-19th century found it lying flat and cracked.
03 Salar de Uyuni
Bolivia20.333° S 67.700° W
Image by WaSZI from Pixabay Salar de Uyuni is not a desert that happens to be white — it is the exposed, dried-out bottom of a chain of prehistoric lakes (geologists call the last big one Lake Tauca) that repeatedly filled and evaporated over tens of thousands of years.
Did you know? At about 10,582 square kilometres, it is roughly 100 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
04 Laguna Verde
Bolivia22.795° S 67.835° W
Pedro Szekely from USA · CC BY 2.0 Laguna Verde sits at the foot of Licancabur, a near-perfectly symmetrical stratovolcano straddling the Bolivia-Chile border whose summit holds a crater lake so high it's among the highest bodies of water on Earth — Inca priests are believed to have climbed to it for ritual purposes centuries ago.
Did you know? Fossil stromatolites, rock-like structures built by microbes roughly 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, cover more than 100 square kilometres around the lake.
05 El Fuerte de Samaipata
Bolivia · 5.2 km from Samaipata18.178° S 63.819° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Dpasten · CC BY-SA 4.0 El Fuerte de Samaipata is not a fortress at all but a single enormous sandstone ridge, about 220 metres long and 60 metres wide, whose back has been carved almost entirely into geometric and animal figures, niches and long canal-like grooves, one of which is known as the "spine of the serpent".
Did you know? The Inca kallanka here is the second largest known in Bolivia, yet its drainage channel and thatched roof appear never to have been finished.
06 Árbol de Piedra
Bolivia22.052° S 67.883° W
Image by sgrunden from Pixabay The Árbol de Piedra, the Stone Tree, is a single rock about 7 m tall standing on the high sands of south-western Bolivia, shaped so precisely like a stunted, wind-bent tree that it has become one of the best-known images of the Bolivian Altiplano.
Did you know? Nearby Laguna Colorada owes its red colour to sediments and the salt-loving alga Dunaliella salina, and is dotted with white islands of borax.
07 Isla Incahuasi
Bolivia20.243° S 67.625° W
Image by magdalenarundgren from Pixabay In the middle of the Salar de Uyuni, where a white crust of salt stretches flat to every horizon, a rocky hill rises like an island from a frozen sea, its slopes bristling with giant columnar cacti.
Did you know? The wood of the cardón cactus has long been used locally in building and for making furniture.
08 Uyuni Train Cemetery
Cementerio de los Trenes
Bolivia · 2.4 km from Uyuni20.481° S 66.837° W
Image by jerzykwpodrozy from Pixabay On the flat, dusty edge of the Bolivian altiplano, just outside the town of Uyuni, rows of dead locomotives stand in the open as if a railway had been abandoned mid-shift.
Did you know? At its height Uyuni was a junction of four lines, towards La Paz via Oruro, Calama in Chile, Potosí, and Villazón on the Argentine border.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Bolivia?
- On our list, Laguna Colorada ranks first, followed by Tiwanaku and Salar de Uyuni.
- Why is Laguna Colorada red?
- Its water is coloured by red sediments and by pigments in the algae that thrive in the salty, shallow lake. The colour shifts through the day with wind and light.
- Why does Salar de Uyuni turn into a mirror?
- In the rainy season a thin layer of water spreads over the almost perfectly flat salt crust and reflects the sky, so the horizon seems to disappear.
- What is the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku?
- A monumental gate carved from a single block of andesite, decorated with a central figure often identified as a staff-holding deity and rows of winged attendants. It is one of the best-known monuments of the Tiwanaku culture.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Bolivia?
- In our collection, the places in Bolivia are most often lakes (3), archaeological sites (2), rock formations (1) and islands (1).
- How many places are on this list in Bolivia?
- The list covers 8 places.