A salt flat is what a lake leaves behind when it dies. Water gathers in a basin with no outlet to the sea, sits under a hard sun until it evaporates, and abandons everything it was carrying — sodium, potassium, lithium, gypsum — as a crust on the floor. Do that for a few thousand years and you get a plain so flat and so blindingly white that pilots use it as a landmark and surveyors calibrate satellites against it. The twelve below are the biggest, ranked strictly by the surface area of a single continuous pan rather than a scattered system of them — which is why Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni leads at 10,582 km² even though Botswana's Makgadikgadi Pans sprawl across roughly 16,000 km² of separate pans divided by sandy desert. Ephemeral salt lakes do count, basins like Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre that are dry crust in almost every year, since excluding them while keeping the Sahara's seasonal chotts would have been an inconsistent line to draw.
12 Largest Salt Flats in the World (2026)
The record The largest salt flat in the world is Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia — 10,582 km² (4,086 sq mi), salt pan surface area. Source: Wikipedia (Salar de Uyuni) + Guinness World Records. Verified .
Largest Salt Flats in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Largest Salt Flats
- The top two alone cover more than 20,000 km² — Salar de Uyuni and Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre together account for roughly as much ground as the other ten entries on this list combined.
- Australia holds three of the twelve. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, Lake Torrens and Lake Mackay are all ephemeral salt lakes that spend virtually their entire existence as dry salt crust.
- Africa supplies the two biggest chotts. Chott el Djerid in Tunisia and Chott Melrhir in Algeria are the Sahara's largest salt pans, and Melrhir contains the lowest point in Algeria.
- Two of these flats sit on international borders — Lake Mackay straddles the Western Australia–Northern Territory line, and Sabkhat Matti spans Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
- Not every huge salt landscape qualifies. Botswana's Makgadikgadi Pans cover around 16,000 km² and the wider Rann of Kutch about 26,000 km², but both are systems of separate pans rather than one continuous sheet of salt, so they are ranked here by their individual components or not at all.
- Several of these pans are major lithium and potash sources, including Salar de Uyuni, Qarhan Playa and Salar de Atacama — the salt is an industrial resource as much as a landscape.
1. Salar de Uyuni
At 10,582 km² (4,086 square miles), Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on Earth, and it is not a close contest — the Bolivian salar covers more ground than the next entry on this list and roughly as much as the island of Jamaica. It lies in the Daniel Campos Province of the Potosí Department, high on the Altiplano at around 3,650 metres above sea level, which is why the light here is so punishing and the horizon so absolutely level. Guinness World Records notes that the exact boundary is genuinely hard to fix, with published estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000 km² depending on how thick a salt layer you insist on before you start counting.
Uyuni is the leftover of a vast prehistoric lake that dried out and left behind two salt flats — this one and the Salar de Coipasa to the north — along with the lakes Poopó and Uru Uru. Beneath the crust sits one of the world's great lithium brine reserves. Above it, in the wet months, a shallow film of water turns the entire plain into a mirror that reproduces the sky so faithfully that the ground stops reading as ground at all, which is the image that draws most people here in the first place.
2. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Covering up to 9,500 km² (3,668 square miles) at maximum extent, Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre is Australia's largest lake — on the rare occasions it is actually a lake. It sits in the arid heart of South Australia at the bottom of the Lake Eyre Basin, a drainage system so vast and so flat that water falling in outback Queensland can take months to arrive here, if it arrives at all. It filled completely only three times between 1860 and 2025. The rest of the time it is a salt pan: a glaring white floor split into two connected basins, Lake Eyre North and the smaller Lake Eyre South.
The name pairs the Arabana word Kati Thanda with the colonial one, reflecting the Arabana people's continuing connection to the country around it. When the water does come, the transformation is genuinely startling — the pan turns into a shallow inland sea and pelicans arrive in enormous numbers to breed on a lake that had not existed the season before, then leave it to evaporate back down to salt. Most visitors see it from the air, because at ground level a pan this size mostly reads as a white line where the desert meets the sky.
3. Great Rann of Kutch
The Great Rann of Kutch spans about 7,500 km² (2,900 square miles) of salt marsh in the Kutch district of Gujarat, making it one of the largest salt flats in Asia and one of the strangest landscapes in India. The word rann traces back to a Sanskrit root meaning salt flat, and the geology earns it: this was once a shallow arm of the Arabian Sea, cut off by tectonic uplift and left to bake. It forms the larger half of the wider Rann of Kutch, a salt-marsh region of roughly 26,000 km² that also takes in the Little Rann and the Banni grasslands.
What makes the Great Rann unusual among the flats on this list is how thoroughly it changes character twice a year. During the summer monsoon, rivers including the Luni, the Rupen and the West Banas push standing water across the flats and turn the whole expanse into a shallow wetland — the breeding ground that draws flamingos here in vast colonies. By winter it has dried back to a white crust hard enough to walk on, which is when the region hosts its cold-season cultural festival and the salt desert fills with visitors who came specifically to stand on nothing.
4. Chott el Djerid
At more than 7,000 km² (2,700 square miles), Chott el Djerid is the largest salt pan in the Sahara, stretching across southern Tunisia between the Tozeur and Kebili governorates. A chott is a specifically North African kind of feature — an endorheic salt lake that fills shallowly in winter and evaporates away to crust through the long summer — and this is the outstanding example of the form. The causeway that crosses it gives one of the few places on the planet where you can drive for tens of kilometres with salt flat on both sides of the road and nothing else in any direction.
The surface is not uniformly white. Mineral staining and iron content tint parts of it pink, green and rust-brown, and the colours shift as the water content changes through the year. The chott is also notorious for mirages, which the flatness and the heat conspire to produce almost on demand. Its otherworldliness has been put to work more than once by filmmakers looking for a landscape that does not read as Earth, and the desert sets built near its edge have become minor pilgrimage sites in their own right.
5. Chott Melrhir
Chott Melrhir covers roughly 6,700 km² (2,600 square miles) in northeastern Algeria, which makes it both the second-largest salt pan of the Sahara and, by surface area, the largest lake in Algeria. Almost the entire basin lies below sea level, and it contains the lowest point in the country at about 40 metres 130 feet below the waterline of the distant Mediterranean. Like its Tunisian neighbour it is a chott: a broad, shallow depression that takes on a thin sheet of winter water and gives it all back to the atmosphere by high summer.
The chott sits south of the Aurès Mountains on the northern rim of the Sahara, in a zone where the Atlas ranges give way to true desert. Its extent varies dramatically with the season — the mapped area represents the basin at its fullest, and for much of the year the visible water is a fraction of that, ringed by an ever-widening apron of salt. The margins support date-palm oases and a scatter of settlements that have worked the salt and the groundwater here for a very long time.
6. Qarhan Playa
Qarhan Playa spreads across 5,856 km² (2,261 square miles) of the Qaidam Basin in China's Qinghai Province, spanning the counties of Golmud and Dulan in Haixi Prefecture. It is sometimes labelled Qarhan Lake on maps, which is misleading — this is a playa, a dry salt plain, and the standing brine pools scattered across it are a small fraction of the whole. It lies high in the Qaidam Basin on the arid northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, ringed by mountains on every side.
Qarhan is the industrial heavyweight of this list. The crust and the brines beneath it hold enormous concentrations of potash, magnesium and lithium, and the playa has been worked at scale for decades, with evaporation ponds, extraction works and a rail line running out across the salt. The result is a landscape that is half raw geology and half machinery: causeways striking dead straight across blinding white flats, and geometric turquoise ponds that look almost artificial against the surrounding desert because they very largely are.
7. Lake Torrens
Lake Torrens covers 5,745 km² (2,218 square miles) of central South Australia, running roughly 250 kilometres north to south in a long narrow band west of the Flinders Ranges. It is an ephemeral, normally endorheic salt lake, and it takes the word normally seriously: it is recorded as having filled with water in 1897 and then not again until April 1989. For practically the whole of its existence it is a salt pan, and the national park that protects it exists to protect a lakebed rather than a lake.
The basin is part of the same rift system that produced Spencer Gulf to the south, which is why it forms such a startlingly linear trench in the landscape. Standing on its edge from the Flinders side, the pan reads as a flat white sea stretching to a horizon with no features on it at all — an effect intensified by the salt haze that hangs over it in the heat. Access is deliberately limited and permits have historically been required to go out onto the surface, which has kept it far emptier of visitors than its size might suggest.
8. Etosha Pan
Etosha Pan sprawls over 4,800 km² (1,900 square miles) of northern Namibia, a characteristic white-and-greenish surface so large and so bright that it registers unmistakably in satellite imagery of southern Africa. The name is usually translated as the great white place, which is about as accurate as a place name gets. It is an endorheic pan — the dried floor of a lake fed by the Kunene River until the river changed course and left the basin to evaporate — and it forms the centrepiece of Etosha National Park in the Oshikoto Region.
What sets Etosha apart from every other flat on this list is the wildlife. Because the pan itself is barren, the waterholes strung around its southern rim become the concentrating force for an entire ecosystem, and in the dry season elephant, black rhino, lion, giraffe and zebra queue at them in numbers that are hard to credit. After heavy rain a shallow film of water gathers on the pan and flamingos arrive to breed. The visual signature of the park — animals apparently walking on a white void, distorted by heat shimmer — comes directly from the salt.
9. Salinas Grandes
Salinas Grandes covers about 4,700 km² (1,800 square miles) of central-northern Argentina, spilling across the provincial borders of Córdoba, Catamarca, La Rioja and Santiago del Estero at an average altitude of only around 180 metres. It is the largest salt flat in Argentina and the second largest in South America after Uyuni, sitting in a low, hot depression of the Pampean plains rather than up on the Andean altiplano — a lowland salt flat, which makes it geologically unlike most of its South American peers.
It is worth being careful with the name, because Argentina has two. The Salinas Grandes that appears constantly in travel photography — the one reached over the Cuesta de Lipán pass from Purmamarca, with the salt-cutting pools and the Andean backdrop — is a different and far smaller flat, the Salinas Grandes del Noroeste shared by Jujuy and Salta, covering roughly 212 km². The one ranked here is the much larger, much lonelier interior pan, worked commercially for salt and crossed by very little other than the road and the railway.
10. Lake Mackay
Lake Mackay covers 3,494 km² (1,349 square miles) straddling the border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory, deep in one of the least-visited quarters of the continent. It is an ephemeral salt lake and it is typically dry, its bed turned brilliant white by capillary action — groundwater drawn upward through the sediment by evaporation, depositing salts and other minerals at the surface as it goes. Early explorers crossing this country recorded finding very white salt and large salt plains rather than anything resembling open water.
From above, the lake is one of the more beautiful objects in the Australian interior: the pan is studded with hundreds of small islands and broken by dune ridges that reach into it from the surrounding desert, producing a mottled pattern of white salt, red sand and pale blue brine that has made it a favourite subject of orbital photography. On the ground it is remote enough that visiting requires serious preparation, and much of the surrounding land is Aboriginal freehold country for which access permits apply.
11. Salar de Atacama
At around 3,000 km² (1,200 square miles), Salar de Atacama is the largest salt flat in Chile, occupying a basin in the Antofagasta Region hemmed in by the Andes on one side and the Cordillera de Domeyko on the other. It sits within the driest non-polar desert on the planet, and the crust reflects that: rather than the smooth pale sheet of Uyuni, much of this salar is a jagged, broken, grey-brown surface of ridged salt that is genuinely difficult to walk across — the product of very slow evaporation and almost no rain to smooth it over.
The salar's brines are among the richest lithium concentrations anywhere, and the evaporation ponds worked across parts of it are visible from a long way off as blocks of unnatural green and blue. It is also, unexpectedly for such a hostile surface, a serious wildlife site: the lagoons at its edges — Chaxa and the Laguna Miscanti system nearby — support large populations of Andean, Chilean and James's flamingos, which feed in water saline enough to kill almost anything else. Nearby San Pedro de Atacama makes it the most easily visited salt flat on this list after Uyuni.
12. Sabkhat Matti
Sabkhat Matti covers approximately 2,950 km² (1,140 square miles) along the border between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, extending roughly 150 kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf coast into the northern edge of the Rub' al Khali. Sabkha is the Arabic term for a salt flat, and this is the largest inland example on the Arabian Peninsula — a vast, low, pale corridor between dune fields, fed not by rivers but by a regional groundwater system draining an area of more than 250,000 km².
It has a reputation, and it has earned it. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the surface of Sabkhah Matti as sometimes soft, wet, muddy and salty slush beneath a hard crust less than a metre deep, and calls the feature extremely treacherous to unwary travellers — a crust that looks like solid ground and gives way under weight. Modern roads now cross it, but the sabkha on either side of the road remains exactly as unreliable as it has always been.
FAQ: The World's Largest Salt Flats
What is the largest salt flat in the world?
Salar de Uyuni in southwest Bolivia, at roughly 10,582 km² (4,086 square miles). Guinness World Records recognises it as the world's largest salt flat, though it notes the precise boundary is hard to fix — published estimates range from 8,000 to 12,000 km² depending on how thick a salt crust you require before counting it.
Why isn't Makgadikgadi ranked first if it is bigger?
Botswana's Makgadikgadi covers around 16,000 km², but it is a complex of separate pans — Sua, Ntwetwe and Nxai — with sandy desert lying between them, not one unbroken salt surface. This list ranks single continuous salt pans, which is why Salar de Uyuni leads. Makgadikgadi is best described as the world's largest salt pan system.
What is the difference between a salt flat, a salt pan and a playa?
They largely describe the same landform under different regional names. A playa is the dry bed of an ephemeral lake; a salt pan or salt flat is a playa whose surface is dominated by a salt crust. South America calls them salares, North Africa calls them chotts, and Arabia calls them sabkhas. All form in closed basins where water evaporates faster than it drains away.
Which continent has the most large salt flats?
They cluster in arid, endorheic basins, so Africa, Asia, Australia and South America dominate. On this list Australia contributes three entries, Africa three, South America two, and Asia and the Middle East the rest. Europe and North America have no salt flat large enough to make the top twelve — the Bonneville Salt Flats cover only around 120 km².
Can you actually visit these salt flats?
Some are straightforward, others are not. Salar de Uyuni and Salar de Atacama have established tourism, and Etosha Pan sits inside a national park. The Great Rann of Kutch is visited heavily in winter. Lake Torrens, Lake Mackay and Sabkhat Matti are remote, and access may require permits, serious preparation or both.
When do salt flats become mirrors?
After rain, when a shallow film of water sits on a surface flat enough that it does not drain or ripple. Salar de Uyuni is the most famous example, typically during the wetter months, but the effect can appear on any of these pans when conditions align. Most of the year they are dry, hard, blinding white crust instead.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.