Dazzling whitewashed buildings, decorative archways, rooftop views of terracotta—the city of Sucre has a rich colonial heritage evident in its buildings, streetscapes and numerous churches. We fly in from Santa Cruz to relax here for a few days before heading into Bolivia’s salt flats.
Road work is all done by hand so lots of breaks are needed.
Sucre boasts several lovely colonial churches. The cathedral dates from the 16th century and it’s museum holds one of Bolivia’s best collections of religious relics.
The beautiful Convento de San Felipe Neri has stunning rooftop views of the city.
The Museo de la Recoleta is housed in a convent that dates from the year 1600.
It features a cedar tree that is said to be more than a thousand years old.
The small mountain of Cal Orck’o just outside Sucre is home to the world’s largest collection of dinosaur tracks. There are about 5,000 impressions of dinosaur footprints from at least 250 different dinosaurs that are embedded on a gigantic, near-vertical limestone rock. The dinosaur footprints were first discovered in 1994 by workers from the local Sucre cement factory. When the cement workers were clearing the grounds, they uncovered a nearly vertical limestone face bearing thousands of dinosaur footprints.
We start our trip to the Salar de Uyuni with a stop in the city of Potosi, once one of the richest cities in the world. It’s been said that enough silver was pulled from it’s bowels to build a bridge from Potosi all the way to Madrid and enough people died inside the mines to build a bridge of bones all the way back. The Casa de Moneda, the former Spanish mint, is now dedicated to Bolivian weapons, art, and minerals.
An ancient donation box well fortified with a 12-lock system.
A close up of an ornately decorated exterior wall of one of the cathedrals.
Along the road we stop for a photo as the landscape turns into desert.
Vicuña llamas happily roam the hills. They are protected by the government for their valuable wool. A scarf can cost around $800.
The Salar de Uyuni, one of the globe’s most evocative and eerie sights and the world’s largest salt flat (12,106 sq km) sits at 3653 meters. It takes about six hours of bumpy, dusty driving to get here. We spend the night at the Luna Salada Hotel, made almost entirely of salt.
Dinner at our salt hotel. Even the table underneath the cloth is made of slabs of salt.
Our first glimpse of the salt flat from the window of our hotel.
Salt, salt everywhere.
We visit a small salt manufacturing plant.
The estimated annual output is nearly 20,000 tons, 18,000 tons of which is for human consumption while the rest is for livestock.
The salar is a dried up ancient lake which left behind large concentrations of salt. When the surface is dry, it is a pure white expanse of the greatest nothing imaginable—just the blue sky, the white ground and us.
A little fun with perspective photography.
A rounded promontory juts into the Salar de Uyuni and on it rises Volcan Tunupa.
At the foot of the volcano is the village of Coquesa in an area specked with ruined ancient villages and burial grounds.
Isla del Pescado, in the heart of the salar, is a hilly outpost covered in Trichoreus cactus and surrounded by a flat white sea of hexagonal salt tiles.
The next attraction, Laguna Colorada, is a fiery red lake that covers 60 sq km and reaches a depth of just 80cm. The rich red coloration is derived from algae and plankton that thrive in the mineral-rich water, and the shoreline is fringed with brilliant white deposits of sodium, magnesium, borax and gypsum. More apparent are the thousands of flamingos that breed here. Once you’ve seen them strutting through these icy mineral lagoons at 5000m elevation, you’ll abandon time-worn associations between flamingos, coconut palms and the steamy tropics.
On to the Sol de Mañana and the 4850m high geyser basin with bubbling mud pots, hellish fumaroles and the thick and nauseating aroma of sulphur fumes.
One of the hotels we stay at in the middle of nowhere.
Strange rock formations conjure up imaginations. One can see condors, faces and even a jester’s head. Tim stands beside what looks to be a rock covered in moss but is actually a plant that grows just 1mm per year. This one is said to be around 500 hundred years old.
On the way back to Uyuni our guide and driver prepare a picnic lunch for us by the side of road. At 4900m the wine makes us feel even dizzier.
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