Mar de Ansenuza

Mar de Ansenuza is South America's largest saltwater lake — roughly six thousand square kilometres of shallow brine amid the agricultural pampas, where you expect nothing but soybeans. That is its first surprise. Its second is the flamingos: all three high-Andean species use the lake, gathering in their tens of thousands in season, over water whose colour shifts from silver to pink to copper with the algae, the light and the wind.

Known on maps as Laguna Mar Chiquita, the lake anchors one of the western hemisphere's most important shorebird wetlands on the central flyways — Ramsar-listed since 2002, and protected as the Mar de Ansenuza National Park since 2022, formal protection arriving almost before the science could finish describing it. The lake has no outlet; evaporation runs its chemistry, far saltier than the sea in most years and swinging across multi-year rain cycles that swell and shrink the shoreline by entire districts. Miramar on the southern shore is the base — lakeside walkway, flamingo interpretation, birding routes — and the visit works on current conditions rather than inherited measurements: check the water, choose shore or boat accordingly, and watch the birds at the distances they set.