Uyuni

Uyuni grew out of the railway. In the late 1880s President Aniceto Arce, convinced that Bolivia would flourish only with modern transport, backed a line built by British-sponsored companies from the Chilean port of Antofagasta to the silver mines of the Altiplano; construction ran from 1888 to 1892, and the first train from Chile reached the station at Uyuni in 1890. The settlement founded at the junction became a trading post and distribution hub, where ore from the mines was loaded for the Pacific coast, and British engineers formed a sizable community in the town.

Four lines came to meet here, from Oruro and La Paz, from Calama in Chile, from Potosí and from Villazón on the Argentine border, and it became an important railway junction. When the mining industry collapsed in the 1940s, partly through the exhaustion of the ores, many locomotives and wagons were simply left on sidings outside town, the beginning of today's Train Cemetery. The town's part in supporting the Chaco War of the 1930s was later recognised by the state.

The town's second life came with tourism to the Salar de Uyuni. As visitors arrived in growing numbers, agencies, hostels and restaurants filled the centre, an airport opened in 2011, and between 2014 and 2017 the Dakar Rally passed through. The brine beneath the salt holds most of Bolivia's lithium, about 22 per cent of the world's known resources as of 2024.

Uyuni is a town of the southern Altiplano, and its customs are those of the surrounding high country, where Andean ritual and Catholic practice run together. As elsewhere in Bolivia, offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth, are buried under the foundations of many houses.

The railway gives the town much of its identity. Its people take pride in its role as a junction and in its history of railway workers and miners, and the old locomotives, the station and the museum behind it are part of how the town presents itself. The clock tower on the main street, a few metres from the town hall, is one of the images most often used to represent it.

The rest of everyday culture follows the Bolivian pattern: football on dusty pitches, Catholic feast days with processions and dancing, and a market day that brings people in from the surrounding villages. Tourism brings visitors from around the world, but beyond the agency streets it remains a quiet, reserved place, where the cold and the wind drive life indoors after dark.

The municipality of Uyuni had about 35,000 people at the 2024 census, most of them in the town itself, which grew from about 1,500 people in 1900 to about 24,100 in 2020. It stands at the edge of a wide plain, with more mountainous country to the east, and the cold desert climate keeps the town compact.

Tourism is the main business: tens of thousands of visitors a year pass through, keeping the agencies, drivers, cooks, hostels and restaurants of the centre busy, with the peaks in the dry winter months and the rainy mirror season. The town is also a gateway for trade with Chile, with a customs and immigration post in the centre. Around it, agriculture is limited to quinoa, llamas and sheep, and the salt miners of the Colchani cooperative work the Salar.

Days start cold and early as jeeps are loaded with fuel, water and luggage outside the agencies, and the streets empty as tours head out onto the salt. The national shortages of fuel and US dollars hit a town that runs on 4x4 vehicles and foreign visitors hard, and blockades on the highways from Oruro or Potosí can delay arrivals for days.

Highland cooking in Uyuni is built on what the southern Altiplano produces: quinoa and llama meat. Quinoa real, royal quinoa, is grown in the Intersalar region between the Uyuni and Coipasa salt flats and is the main crop around Colchani, and llama appears on menus in town. Set lunches of soup and a main course are the everyday meal in market stalls and small restaurants.

The town's restaurant streets have adapted to the tour trade, with pizzerias, some offering llama as a topping, alongside Mexican and vegetarian dishes for travellers. On the tours themselves, cooks travelling with the jeeps serve hearty meals of meat, potatoes and soup, often eaten on the salt or in simple lodgings.

Api, the hot, sweet drink of morocho corn and cinnamon, is drunk with fried buñuelos, and coca tea is offered everywhere to ease the altitude. Salteñas are sold mid-morning. Beer and singani, the white-grape brandy of the southern valleys, are the usual drinks.