The Atlas Obscura Guide to Winter Sun

Every winter sun list is the same list. Somewhere with a beach, ranked by average January temperature, with a paragraph about resorts. The only variable is the number, and the number is available on any weather site for free. Here is a better question. Rather than asking where it happens to be warm in January, ask where January is the only time to go — where the northern winter opens something that is closed, invisible, or actively dangerous the rest of the year. That question has much stranger answers. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia: the place that only exists in winter Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest salt flat on Earth, nearly 4,000 square miles of it at 12,000 feet on the altiplano. For most of the year it is a white plain. Atlas Obscura has reported that once the rains stop in April it becomes so uniformly featureless that it is used — along with a handful of other salt flats, deserts and ice sheets — to calibrate the optical sensors on orbiting satellites . Technicians point sensors at it precisely because nothing is there. Then the wet austral summer arrives, which is the northern winter, and a thin layer of water settles on top of the salt crust. The flat becomes a mirror roughly the size of Northern Ireland. The horizon disappears. People photographed standing on it appear to be standing in the sky. That is a December-to-March phenomenon. Go in July and you are looking at a car park. While you are there: the Great Train Graveyard sits on the outskirts of Uyuni, more than a hundred British-built steam locomotives from the early twentieth century, abandoned and eaten by salt wind. No fence, no guards. They were picked over and vandalised long ago, which is somehow the point. The salt flat itself has entries for the tours out of Uyuni, San Pedro de Atacama, and Tupiza. Nearby, on the same high desert circuit: Laguna Colorada , a red lake at 4,000 metres full of rare flamingos; Laguna Verde , emerald and emphatically not for swimming; and the Salvador Dalí Desert , named for the obvious reason. The Salton Sea, California: the desert that would kill you in July The Salton Sea sits in the Southern California desert, and summer there is genuinely hazardous. Winter is the season it comes alive — which is not a figure of speech. Slab City , the off-grid community on an abandoned Navy base near Niland, swells by thousands of people every winter as snowbirds arrive in RVs and leave again before the heat. At its entrance stands Salvation Mountain , 150 feet wide and 50 feet tall, built by Leonard Knight out of adobe and donated paint after his attempt to launch a hot air balloon carrying a message about God's love failed to get off the ground. He worked on it for over twenty years and lived out of his truck while doing so. In 2002 a US senator entered it into the Congressional Record as a national treasure. Knight has died; visitors still bring paint. And the Salton Sea itself is one of the strangest landscapes in North America — an accidental lake created by an engineering failure, once marketed as a desert Riviera, now a shoreline of dead fish, barnacles and salt. The visitor centre displays fatty deposits formed during mass fish die-offs, labelled Salton Sea Hush Puppies. Scientists who once called it an ecological wasteland now describe it as a crown jewel of avian biodiversity, both things being true at once. The wider Salton Sea collection includes geothermal mud pots that burp and gurgle, the domed rocks of Obsidian Butte, Bombay Beach, and a museum devoted to a sea that should never have existed. Calipatria alone holds seven entries. Go between November and March. The Atacama, Chile: the driest place on Earth The Atacama in northern Chile is dry enough that things simply do not rot, rust, or wash away. That is the whole reason to go. For more than thirty years a man named Rodrigo Martinez has walked out into it looking for meteorites, and the collection he has built is now among the largest in the world. The Meteorite Mu