Superlative · deserts by beauty
The Most Beautiful Deserts in the World
8 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
A desert can be one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth — not for scale or harshness, but for pure colour, form, and light: red dunes at dawn, a salt flat turned to a mirror, white chalk shaped like sculpture. This is our editors' pick of the world's most beautiful deserts, judged by how they look rather than how extreme they are.
It isn't a strict ranking, and it is deliberately a different list from our most extreme deserts, which is about scale and severity. Each place here is a real, mapped destination with an honest note on how to reach it and the light or season that shows it best.
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Sossusvlei & Deadvlei Red dunes
Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia
Namibia's towering rust-red dunes above the white clay pan of Deadvlei, with its bare black camelthorn trees — a photographer's desert at sunrise.
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Wadi Rum Valley of the Moon
Southern Jordan
Jordan's desert of red sand and soaring sandstone massifs, glowing at dawn and dusk beneath vast skies.
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Salar de Uyuni The mirror
Altiplano, southwestern Bolivia
The world's largest salt flat in Bolivia, a blinding white plain that turns into a perfect sky-mirror when a thin film of water covers it.
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Lençóis Maranhenses
Maranhão, Brazil
Brazil's sheets of white dunes cupping thousands of rain-fed turquoise and emerald lagoons — a desert that fills with water.
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The White Desert
Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt
Egypt's surreal plain of wind-carved white chalk formations standing like sculptures on the sand.
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The Atacama Desert
Northern Chile
Chile's high, otherworldly desert of salt valleys, coloured lagoons, geysers, and the clearest night skies on Earth.
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Tatacoa Desert
Huila, Colombia
Colombia's small, vivid badlands of red and grey clay eroded into ridges and gullies under a starry sky.
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Rub' al Khali
Southern Arabian Peninsula
The Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand sea in the world, its immense apricot dunes rolling across Arabia.
Deserts are all about light: the low sun of early morning and late afternoon brings out the colour and shadow that make these places beautiful, and the same clear, dry air makes many of them superb for stargazing. Each guide notes the best season and how to reach it.
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