In northern Chile, where roads dissolve into seas of sand and stone, Salar de Surire emerges like a shattered mirror between three borders. At 4,200 meters altitude, this salt desert—named after the Andean rhea (surí in Quechua)—is no inert landscape. It is a living organism: its whitish crusts conceal hypersaline lagoons of electric blue, fed by 30°C underground springs. Here, the earth exhales sulfurous vapors, and silence breaks only with the squawk of Andean flamingos, their slender legs sinking into lithium- and borax-rich muds untouched by industrial hands.
This salt flat is a relic of the Pleistocene era, when prehistoric lakes covered the region. Today, its 11,298 hectares protect a unique ecosystem: bofedales, wetlands of moss and llareta that act as natural sponges, filtering meltwater from the Putre and Guallatiri volcanoes. The latter, active and crowned by fumaroles, watch over the land like ancient deities. On their slopes, vicuñas—whose populations rebounded from 500 in 1975 to over 20,000 today—graze alongside rheas, flightless birds that inspired pre-Columbian petroglyphs still visible in nearby ravines.
Yet Surire is not just nature. It is an archive of Andean memory. Less than 10 km away, in the Allane ravine, stand chullpas of stone and clay: collective tombs of the Lupaca culture, which thrived here centuries before the Inca Empire. Modern Aymara people, heirs to this legacy, maintain a sacred bond with the land. Every November, during Machaq Mara (Andean New Year), they make offerings to Pachamama on the salt flat’s shores, seeking permission to collect flamingo eggs—a ancestral practice now regulated to protect breeding colonies.
The salt flat holds another secret: the Polloquere Hot Springs, thermal pools bubbling at 35°C through salt cracks. According to local lore, these sodium- and magnesium-rich waters were used by shamans for purification rituals. Today, travelers can bathe here under starry skies while the night cold freezes pool edges into delicate crystals.
Declared a Natural Monument in 1983, Surire remains a destination only for adventurous souls. There are no luxury hotels or souvenir shops; the nearest lodging lies in Putre, a cobblestoned village 120 km away. Access requires 4×4 vehicles and a permit from CONAF, but the reward is an unfiltered dialogue with the earth—no intermediaries, no illusions.
