Laguna Verde
Interesting facts
- With ultraviolet light about 40 per cent stronger than at sea level, the lake is compared to Mars and used as a model of a Martian lake.
- During the last glacial maximum the lake stood at least 45 metres higher and merged with neighbouring Laguna Blanca; it reached its highest level about 13,240 years ago.
- Former high water levels have left some 30 major and 12 minor ancient shorelines etched into the slopes around the basin.
- 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.
- Despite the toxic water, living mats of cyanobacteria still grow here, and a salt-loving bacterium, Chromohalobacter sarecensis, was first discovered in the lake.
- The lake covers about 7.5 square kilometres yet is only about 5.4 metres deep, and a narrow causeway splits it into two parts.
- Today Laguna Verde and Laguna Blanca are linked by a single channel, yet their water chemistry and microbial life are strikingly different.
- The lake has no surface outlet: it sits in a closed basin of about 776 square kilometres and is fed mainly by snowfall.
- Although air temperatures can drop to around minus 30 degrees Celsius, the lake is seldom covered with ice.
- The lake marks the far south-western corner of the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve and of Bolivia itself.
Why it is worth it
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. The lagoon and the volcano read as a single composition, both sitting above 4,300 meters on the Altiplano.
The color itself is a chemistry-meets-weather phenomenon rather than a living one. Copper and arsenic-bearing minerals from the surrounding volcanic terrain dissolve into the shallow water, and when wind picks up across the lake's surface, it stirs suspended sediment and mineral particles into the water column, shifting the color from a calm pale turquoise to a vivid, almost frothy emerald. That means the same lagoon can look like two different lakes depending on the hour and the wind — unlike Lake Hillier or Lake Natron, whose colors come from living microorganisms, this one comes from mineral chemistry reacting to physical disturbance.
That same chemistry makes it genuinely dangerous rather than merely dramatic: arsenic and copper concentrations are high enough that the water is toxic, and essentially no fish or significant aquatic life survive in it. It's a useful reminder, on a trip through the Altiplano's colorful lagoons, that visual intensity and habitability are unrelated here.
Good to know
The same geothermal system responsible for the lagoon's minerals also feeds the nearby Termas de Polques hot springs, often visited on the same route.
Best time to visit
Afternoon wind gives the most vivid emerald-green color; calmer early mornings show a paler turquoise instead.
Getting there
118 km from Calama. El Loa Airport (CJC) is about 115 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Licancabur 6.5 km · volcano
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Laguna Verde is a salt lake in an endorheic basin, in the southwestern Altiplano in Bolivia. It is located in the Sur Lípez Province of the Potosí Department. It is close to the Chilean border, at the foot of the volcano Licancabur.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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