Cono de Arita
Interesting facts
- The condors behind the salt flat's name are said to have gathered because cattle driven across it to Chile left carcasses along the route.
- The salt flat around the cone lies at about 3,460 metres above sea level.
- Besides salt, the Salar de Arizaro holds deposits of marble, iron, copper and onyx.
- The salt flat lies within the so-called Lithium Triangle, and companies have assessed it for lithium carbonate extraction.
- Satellite images from NASA's Earth Observing-1 show the yardangs on the salt flat lined up precisely with the prevailing north-westerly winds.
- Other hills on the flat are shaped by salt weathering: salt crystals growing in the rock gnaw at their bases, leaving sharp-edged mounds.
- A rival, disputed explanation derives Arizaro from Quechua words for "wounding footprints", after the sharp salt crust underfoot.
Why it is worth it
In the middle of one of the largest salt flats on Earth stands a cone so regular it looks made by hand. The Cono de Arita rises roughly 200 metres above the white floor of the Salar de Arizaro, in the high Puna de Atacama of north-western Argentina, and its summit reaches about 3,689 metres above sea level. Seen from the flat, its slopes run up in clean straight lines to a sharp point, and the isolation makes it look even more geometric: around it there is nothing but salt, with the dark ranges of the Andes far away on the horizon.
Its regularity has generated a small mythology. The cone is often described as a volcano that never erupted, or as the most perfect natural cone in the world, and local tradition holds that it served as a ceremonial site before the Inca. Geologists tell a plainer story. Argentina's official geological map of the Antofalla sheet shows the hill as a remnant of early Miocene volcanic deposits, its lower part made of volcanic material and its summit capped by a slightly younger ignimbrite, the welded deposit of a hot ash flow. The rocks that once surrounded it have been worn away, leaving a solitary erosional relic in the middle of much younger Holocene salt. The cone was put forward as a candidate among the Seven Natural Wonders of Argentina.
The Salar de Arizaro around it covers some 1,600 square kilometres, the sixth largest salt flat in the world and the second largest in Argentina after the Salinas Grandes. Its name comes from the Atacameño language and is usually explained as "place of the condor". Wind-sculpted ridges known as yardangs line parts of its surface, and the flat is crossed by the Salta–Antofagasta railway and Provincial Route 27.
Getting there
The Cono de Arita lies at the southern end of the Salar de Arizaro in the Los Andes Department of Salta Province. The usual approach from the city of Salta runs along National Route 51 to San Antonio de los Cobres, then Provincial Route 27 through Olacapato and Caipe to the village of Tolar Grande, from which some 70–85 km of unpaved tracks cross the salt flat to the cone. The nearest airport is Salta's Martín Miguel de Güemes International (SLA), about 227 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
-25.01806, -67.72889per Wikidata