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 …