To get here we crossed two days of wild terrain, volcanic deserts, pink lagoons filled with flamingos, canyons and dirt roads disappearing into the horizon. By the time you arrive it already feels like you've landed on another planet. The hotel sits right on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, and it's made entirely from salt blocks, not coated or decorated, but actually built out of compressed bricks of salt cut from the flats themselves.

Arriving at the Uyuni Salt Hotel

We arrived just as the mirror effect was starting on the salt outside, which already looked completely unreal before we'd even checked in. Staying here turned out to be one of the strangest and most incredible nights of my life.

Crossing the volcanic desert on the way to the Uyuni Salt Hotel

By the time you arrive, it already feels like another planet.

Exploring a room made of salt

Everything in the room is salt. The pillars, the walls, the chairs, little carved llamas and cacti on the shelves, the bedside table, the bed frame itself. The mattress is the one exception, thankfully. The air stays cool and dry too, because the salt naturally absorbs moisture, so it feels like the desert's own version of air conditioning.

Room made entirely of salt blocks at the Uyuni Salt Hotel, Bolivia

Walls, chairs, bed frame. All of it salt.

Obviously you can't stay in a salt hotel without tasting the walls, purely for scientific reasons. Verdict: tastes more like dust than salt, though we couldn't agree on the best spot to lick.

The salt palace lobby

The main hall looks like a snow palace, huge white pillars, salt murals and sculptures glowing under warm yellow light. Everything echoes slightly because there's so little else around, and the whole place is quiet and calm in a way that feels genuinely surreal.

Corridor of the Uyuni Salt Hotel, built entirely from salt blocks

Salt murals, salt sculptures, salt everything.

The Salar de Uyuni itself is what's left of a prehistoric lake, Lake Minchin. Thousands of years ago the water evaporated and left behind salt layers up to 10 metres deep, covering more than 10,000 square kilometres. It's the flattest surface on Earth, accurate enough that NASA actually uses it to calibrate satellites. When it rains, the crust floods with a shallow film of water and the whole thing turns into the world's biggest mirror, sky and ground merging until you genuinely can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

Walking onto the salt flats

The best part of staying at a salt hotel is that you can walk straight from your room onto the flats themselves. With a few hours before dinner and our guide gone for the day, we walked out towards the sunset into that same mirror effect, and it's honestly like nothing I've ever seen. Clouds reflecting in the floor, the water turning a completely unreal orange.

Walking onto the mirror-like Uyuni Salt Flats at sunset

You can't tell where the sky ends and the ground begins.

Sunset on the world's largest mirror

The light turned gold, then pink, then a deep blue, the horizon disappeared completely, and it genuinely felt like floating on cloud. This has to be one of the craziest things I've seen, not just on this trip but in my whole life. Because the sun sets into the mirror itself, you get two sunsets at once, one above and one reflected below, deep reds and oranges with tiny cars driving straight across the reflection. We stayed until the temperature dropped below freezing just watching the colours shift, the kind of silence that makes you stop talking entirely.

Sunset reflected on the Uyuni Salt Flats

Two sunsets at once. One above, one reflected below.

That night we slept on our salt beds under thick blankets in complete stillness, and woke early the next morning for sunrise, which turned out to be even more ridiculous. If you're planning your own trip, I've written up everything worth knowing before you visit the Uyuni Salt Flats.