Salinas Grandes — Attraction in Municipio de La Poma

Imho this is one of the most interesting places I saw while living 1 month as a tourist in the Jujuy province in Argentina. Some may say it is just a "salt lake" (as I read in another review), but beauty is much in the eyes of the viewer. It has these incredible houses made of salt bricks, hexagonal ground patterns, pools made by machines for salt extraction, natural pools, and the region is so flat that it makes up for incredible photo compositions (just lay low and you will see people becoming giants, others dwarves). The way to get there is already worthy in itself, as you will travel through amazing scenery ranging from 2400 to 4300 meters of altitude. The only thing I didn't enjoy was the time of stay at the Salinas. Assuming you take the tour with a guide (a guide is apparently mandatory to visit the natural pools), the whole experience at the Salinas won't last more than 1h30 or so. It is a shame considering it is such an unique place and this such a once-in-a-lifetime experience for so many. I wish I could have spent a...

We enjoyed the visit after doing for negotiable on the price, as they tried all sorts of trucks to make us pay more. First the change then they could not return the difference. They ended up backing down. The tour they offer (in your car) goes visit 2 places, where they extract the salt and where a spring comes out. Our lady guide seemed to know the bare minimum and got hopelessly confused about how fresh and salty water gets there. Oh well I'll get it from Wikipedia I though, but even the the English version is bare bones and the Spanish better but not very deep either. Nevertheless this is well worth the time getting to it. Check for llama and guanacos on the mountains...

This is a nice "pit stop" on the road from Purmamarca to Salta. I say pitstop because it won't really take you more than 30 minutes (if it's flooded). We went the 16th of December and the area was flooded, which meant we could only see the manmade pools and not the natural pools which are crazy beautiful. It's normal during Jan-Feb to have flooding due to the high amount of rain.

They have over 3,000 pools and this is on private land so you have to pay $500 pesos or $1.50 USD to enter. Dennis was our guide. He took cool photos of us and then allowed us to stay behind to take our own photos.

photos taken by...