Laguna Brava

Laguna Brava in La Rioja Province sits at 4,327 metres in the high puna, pink with flamingos and framed by the white salt crust of the lake shore and the orange and red volcanic peaks of the Nevado de Incahuasi behind it — a landscape that looks composited from three different photographs. The access track climbs from the Vinchina Valley through 60 kilometres of high desert with no services and no settlements, arriving at a lake that has been visited by perhaps 2,000 people in total. The flamingos here — James's, Andean, and Chilean, all three species — feed in water that reaches pH 10.

Laguna Brava is a saline lake on the puna of La Rioja Province within the Reserva Provincial Laguna Brava, surrounded by the highest volcanic peaks in the Argentine Andes — the Nevado de Incahuasi at 6,621 metres and the Cerro de la Vega at 6,018 metres. The lake sits at 4,327 metres in the Puna de Atacama and is one of three principal nesting sites for James's flamingo (Phoenicoparrus jamesi) in Argentina, a species with a global population of approximately 100,000 birds. The extreme alkalinity (pH 10) and salinity of the lake, combined with the altitude and extreme diurnal temperature variation (from -15°C at night to +20°C at midday), make it inhospitable to almost everything except the flamingos, the bacteria in the biomat, and the salt-tolerant algae that give the water its colour. The approach road from Jagüe, the last settlement, follows the Río Blanco through a gorge of red and white volcanic rock that is itself a significant part of what makes the journey worthwhile.