The Most Beautiful Places in Potosí
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Potosí are Laguna Colorada, Salar de Uyuni and Laguna Verde. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The department of Potosí covers Bolivia's southwestern Altiplano, a high plateau where the Andes hold dried-up prehistoric lakes, volcanoes and mineral-rich lagoons at around 3,600 to 4,500 metres. Thin air, strong sun and a dry climate keep the landscape bare, so colour comes from salt, minerals and algae rather than vegetation. The region's name comes from the silver mountain of Cerro Rico above the city of Potosí, which made it one of the richest places of the Spanish colonial world.
At the centre lies the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on Earth, the remnant of ancient lakes that once covered the plateau. In the wet season a thin layer of water turns it into a vast mirror. Isla Incahuasi rises from the white crust as a rocky hill covered in tall columnar cacti. On the edge of the town of Uyuni, the Train Cemetery gathers rusting locomotives from the era when railways carried minerals to the Pacific.
Further south, the Eduardo Avaroa reserve holds the high lagoons. Laguna Colorada is red from algae and pigments in its shallow water and draws large numbers of flamingos. Laguna Verde, at the foot of the volcano Licancabur, owes its green tint to dissolved minerals. In the Siloli desert, the Árbol de Piedra is a slender rock shaped by wind-driven sand into the silhouette of a tree.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laguna Colorada | Lake | |
| 2 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | |
| 3 | Laguna Verde | Lake | |
| 4 | Árbol de Piedra | Rock formation | |
| 5 | Isla Incahuasi | Island | |
| 6 | 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 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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 Potosí?
- On our list, Laguna Colorada ranks first, followed by Salar de Uyuni and Laguna Verde.
- Why is Laguna Colorada red?
- The colour comes from red sediments and from pigments in algae living in the shallow, salty water. The same algae feed the flamingos that gather on the lake.
- How was the Salar de Uyuni formed?
- It is the remains of prehistoric lakes that once covered much of the Altiplano. As they evaporated, they left a thick crust of salt over a vast flat basin, the largest salt flat in the world.
- What is the Uyuni Train Cemetery?
- It is a collection of abandoned steam locomotives and wagons outside the town of Uyuni, left there after the decline of the mining railways in the 20th century.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Potosí?
- In our collection, the places in Potosí are most often lakes (3), rock formations (1), islands (1) and abandoned railways (1).
- How many places are on this list in Potosí?
- The list covers 6 places.