The Most Beautiful Salt Flats in the World
13 places in 11 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful salt flats in the world are Badwater Basin (United States), Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia) and Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre (Australia). The list covers 13 salt flats in 11 countries. The United States has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A salt flat is what remains when a lake dries away and leaves its minerals behind. Evaporation spreads a crust of salt across ground so level that the horizon seems to vanish, and the surface often cracks into polygons or, after rain, turns into a mirror that doubles the sky. These are among the flattest and brightest places on earth, and their beauty is almost abstract: white against blue, geometry repeated to infinity, colour shifting with the angle of the sun.
The collection gathers very different kinds of emptiness. Badwater Basin in Death Valley is the lowest point in North America, its salt crust broken into a honeycomb of ridges. Bonneville in Utah has been the stage for land speed records, and Racetrack Playa, also in Death Valley, is known for stones that leave long tracks across the cracked mud. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flat in the world, becomes a vast mirror in the rainy season, and Chaka Salt Lake in China is reflective in the same way. The Great Rann of Kutch in India spreads a white desert to the horizon, and Deadvlei in Namibia sets the dark skeletons of long-dead trees on a white clay pan among red dunes.
Every salt flat here was chosen for how it looks and the list is ordered by beauty. Each has its own description, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Badwater Basin | Salt flat | United States | |
| 2 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 3 | Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre | Salt flat | Australia | |
| 4 | Chott el Djerid | Salt flat | Tunisia | |
| 5 | Makgadikgadi Pans | Salt flat | Botswana | |
| 6 | Great Rann of Kutch | Salt flat | India | |
| 7 | Bonneville Salt Flats | Salt flat | United States | |
| 8 | Deadvlei | Salt flat | Namibia | |
| 9 | Salinas Grandes | Salt flat | Argentina | |
| 10 | Chaka Salt Lake | Salt flat | People's Republic of China | |
| 11 | Racetrack Playa | Salt flat | United States | |
| 12 | Salar de Tara | Salt flat | Chile | |
| 13 | Pedra de Lume salt ponds | Salt flat | Cape Verde |
01 Badwater Basin
United States36.250° N 116.826° W
Tuxyso · CC BY-SA 3.0 Badwater Basin is the bottom of the continent: a salt pan in Death Valley lying 86 metres (282 feet) below sea level, the lowest point in North America. The scale of the place only becomes clear when you look up. High on the cliffs of the Black Mountains above the parking area, a small sign marks where sea level would be, absurdly far overhead; across the valley to the west, the Panamint Range climbs to Telescope Peak at 3,368 metres, so that the eye takes in a vertical span of more than three kilometres in a single glance.
Did you know? Badwater lies only about 80 miles (130 km) in a straight line from the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States.
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. Each cycle left another sheet of salt, and today those layers stack up to 10 meters thick over an area the size of a small country. Walking on it, you are walking on the floor of an Ice Age sea.
Did you know? According to Aymara legend, the flat formed from the tears and milk of Tunupa, a mountain deserted by her giant husband; many locals prefer the name Salar de Tunupa.
03 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Australia28.667° S 137.167° E
Stephan Ridgway · CC BY 2.0 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre is Australia's largest lake and also its lowest point, sitting about 15 meters below sea level — yet for most of any given decade it is not a lake at all, just a blinding white salt pan. It sits at the bottom of one of the largest internally draining river systems on the planet, gathering runoff from roughly one-sixth of the Australian continent, and still almost never fills, because the region around it receives some of the lowest rainfall anywhere in the country. When it does flood, the water usually didn't fall here — it fell in Queensland or the Northern Territory weeks earlier and traveled hundreds of kilometers down river channels to finally pool in this basin.
Did you know? During the 1989–1990 flood an estimated 200,000 pelicans, about 80 percent of Australia's entire population, gathered at the lake to feed and roost.
04 Chott el Djerid
Tunisia · 38 km from Tozeur33.700° N 8.433° E
Atef Ouni · CC BY-SA 4.0 Chott el Djerid is the largest salt pan of the Sahara: a flat, glaring plain of salt and mud stretching some 250 kilometres across southern Tunisia between the oasis towns of Tozeur and Nefta to the north-west and Kebili and Douz to the south-east. Its area is given as anything from 5,000 to over 7,000 square kilometres, and that uncertainty says something about the place — it has no fixed shoreline, only a margin where the desert turns white. Most of the year it is almost completely dry, with rain averaging well under 100 millimetres, and in summer the air above it can pass 50 °C.
Did you know? In 1874 the French officer François Élie Roudaire proposed flooding the chotts with Mediterranean water to create an inland sea in the Sahara.
05 Makgadikgadi Pans
Botswana20.717° S 24.951° E
Image by serendypita from Pixabay Few places on Earth are as flat, as white or as silent as the Makgadikgadi. In north-eastern Botswana, south-east of the Okavango Delta and ringed by the Kalahari, a chain of salt pans spreads across roughly 16,000 square kilometres — one of the largest salt flats in the world. In the dry months the crust is hard and blinding, the horizon dissolves into heat shimmer, and the only scale is the occasional line of tyre tracks or a lone baobab standing on a former shoreline.
Did you know? A baobab on the edge of the pans, named after the explorer James Chapman, served nineteenth-century travellers as an unofficial post office.
06 Great Rann of Kutch
India24.086° N 70.638° E
Nagarjun Kandukuru from Bangalore, India · CC BY 2.0 For most of the year the Great Rann of Kutch is one of the emptiest places in India: some 7,500 square kilometres of flat, salty clay in the far west of Gujarat, stretching north towards the border with Pakistan. It lies so low, averaging about fifteen metres above sea level, that the monsoon floods it each summer with a shallow sheet of water; as the dry season returns the water evaporates and leaves behind a crust of salt. By winter the surface is a brilliant white desert of hexagonal salt plates that runs to the horizon in every direction, without a tree, a hill or a building to give it scale.
Did you know? The word Rann comes from the Sanskrit iriṇa, meaning salt flat or barren ground, a term already found in the Rigveda and the Mahabharata.
07 Bonneville Salt Flats
United States40.800° N 113.800° W
Image by wnk1029 from Pixabay West of the Great Salt Lake, where Utah meets Nevada, the desert floor turns into a sheet of white so flat that the curvature of the Earth seems visible on the horizon. The Bonneville Salt Flats run about 19 kilometres long and 8 wide, a hard crust of salt — almost entirely common salt — that is about a metre and a half thick at the centre and thins to a couple of centimetres at its edges. Mountains rise around the margins, and the light changes the plain from hour to hour.
Did you know? Repeated freezing and thawing of brackish water on the salt crust produces natural hexagonal patterns across the surface.
08 Deadvlei
Namibia24.763° S 15.295° E
Image by kuloser from Pixabay Deadvlei is a white clay pan enclosed by some of the highest dunes on Earth, deep in the Namib Desert of western Namibia, and it holds one of the most unearthly scenes on the planet. On its cracked, bone-pale floor stand the blackened skeletons of camel thorn trees, their branches twisted against a backdrop of rust-orange sand and an intensely blue sky. The colours are so pure and the shadows so sharp that photographs of the place are often mistaken for paintings, and it has served as an otherworldly backdrop in films including The Cell and The Fall.
Did you know? The name means dead marsh, joining the English word dead with the Afrikaans vlei, a lake or marsh; it is often wrongly translated as dead valley.
09 Salinas Grandes
Argentina23.633° S 65.894° W
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 Salinas Grandes is a sheet of white laid across the Puna, the high Andean plateau of northwest Argentina, at about 3,450 metres above sea level. It spans the border of Jujuy and Salta provinces and is one of the largest salt flats in South America: a dead-level crust of salt, in places up to half a metre thick, that stretches away to a rim of brown and violet mountains. The air is thin and dry, the sky an unusual deep blue, and in bright sun the glare off the salt is so strong that the horizon seems to dissolve.
Did you know? The salt flat began forming some 5 to 10 million years ago, as volcanic salts gathered in a closed basin and saline waters slowly evaporated.
10 Chaka Salt Lake
People's Republic of China36.698° N 99.096° E
Image by JINMOUREN from Pixabay At more than 3,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau, Chaka is a salt lake so shallow and still that its surface often turns into a vast mirror. A thin film of brine lies over a hard white crust of salt, and on calm days it reflects the sky, the clouds and the people walking out across it, so that the horizon seems to disappear. This effect has given the lake its popular name, the "Mirror of the Sky", and turned it into a major destination – more than three million people came in 2018.
Did you know? The lake holds an estimated 448 million tonnes of salt, which Chinese reports say could supply the whole country's table salt for some 70 years.
11 Racetrack Playa
United States36.685° N 117.558° W
Jason Hickey · CC BY 3.0 Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed high in a remote valley of Death Valley National Park, about 3 miles long and just over a mile wide, at 3,708 feet above sea level. Its surface is a perfectly flat mosaic of cracked clay polygons, pale as bone and ringed by dark mountains. Scattered across it lie rocks of all sizes, from pebbles to sizeable boulders, and behind each one runs a long, shallow groove: a trail showing that the stone has travelled across the mud, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in curves and zigzags, and occasionally in parallel with a neighbour.
Did you know? The playa is almost perfectly level: its northern end stands only about 4 cm higher than its southern end, nearly three miles away.
12 Salar de Tara
Chile23.017° S 67.300° W
Carlos Urzua · CC BY 2.0 Salar de Tara lies at about 4,300 metres in the high puna of Chile's Atacama region, close to where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia meet. It is a shallow salt basin of some 48 square kilometres whose open lagoons expand and shrink with the seasons, fringed by bright white salt crust and green high-Andean wetlands, and framed by enormous eroded rock formations. Along its edge stand the Catedrales de Tara, a massive wall of tall, wind-cut volcanic pinnacles, and on the approach from the highway rise the Monjes de la Pacana, isolated vertical rock pillars scattered across the open plain like solitary figures.
Did you know? Rain brings only about 150 millimetres of water a year, while the dry air could evaporate roughly ten times as much.
13 Pedra de Lume salt ponds
Salinas de Pedra de Lume
Cape Verde16.773° N 22.901° W
Ladislav Luppa · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the east coast of Sal, the island in Cape Verde named for salt, the floor of an extinct volcanic crater is laid out as a patchwork of shallow evaporation pans. Seen from the crater rim, the salinas of Pedra de Lume form a mosaic of white crusts and still, pale water ringed by brown volcanic slopes, only a short walk inland from the sea. According to geologists, the brine does not seep in sideways from the ocean but rises from deep below the ground.
Did you know? The crater is estimated to hold more than 50 million tonnes of rock salt.
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 is the largest salt flat in the world?
- Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia is the largest salt flat in the world, covering more than 10,000 square kilometres at an altitude of about 3,600 metres.
- What is the most beautiful salt flat in the world?
- On our list, Badwater Basin (United States) ranks first, followed by Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia) and Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre (Australia).
- Which country has the most salt flats?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (3), Argentina (1) and Australia (1).
- How do the stones move on Racetrack Playa?
- Research published in 2014 showed that thin sheets of ice form on the playa after rain and, as they break up on sunny, windy days, push the rocks slowly across the slick mud, leaving long trails behind them.
- How many salt flats are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 13 salt flats in 11 countries. The United States has the most, with 3.