Laguna Brava

Laguna Brava lies beyond 4,200 metres on the La Rioja puna, pink with flamingos against white salt crust and the orange-red volcanic wall behind — a landscape that looks composited from three different photographs. The track up from the last settlement follows a gorge of red and white rock through high desert with no services, and the journey itself is a large part of the point.

The reserve protects a saline lake beneath a skyline of six-thousanders, alkaline and salty enough that almost nothing survives it except the flamingos — Chilean, Andean and James's, all three species — the biomat bacteria and the algae that colour the water. It ranks among the principal Argentine sites for the scarce James's flamingo, vicuñas graze the surrounding puna in numbers recovered from near-extinction, and the route passes the nineteenth-century stone refuges built for drovers who once pushed cattle over these passes to Chile. The visit runs through authorised excursions with registered guides: road, wind and snow conditions confirmed before the ascent, acclimatisation taken seriously, the managed route respected, and wildlife left at its own distances. Nights here drop far below freezing while middays burn — the puna's arithmetic, unchanged.