The 21 Best Deserts and Dark-Sky Landscapes for Stargazing

Dry air, high ground, and distance from city light make deserts among the finest places on Earth to look up. These are the atlas’s deserts and dune-lands — landscapes as extraordinary by night as by day. (Skies are best around the new moon; each entry notes conditions.)

Lençóis Maranhenses

Maranhão, Brazil

A vast field of white dunes that fills each rainy season with thousands of crystal-clear turquoise lagoons — a desert that becomes, improbably, dotted with lakes.

Desert & dunes Latin America

Rub' al Khali

Southern Arabian Peninsula

The Empty Quarter — the largest continuous sand desert on Earth, a sea of dunes up to 250 metres tall rolling across an area larger than France.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Salar de Uyuni

Altiplano, southwestern Bolivia

The largest salt flat on Earth — a blinding-white expanse of over 10,000 square kilometres high on the Bolivian Altiplano that becomes, after rain, the world's biggest natural mirror, reflecting the sky so perfectly that the horizon disappears.

Desert & dunes Latin America

Sossusvlei & Deadvlei

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

The soaring red dunes of the ancient Namib — among the tallest on Earth — surrounding the surreal white clay pan of Deadvlei, where 900-year-old blackened trees stand skeletal against orange sand and blue sky.

Desert & dunes Africa

The Sahara (Erg Chebbi)

Merzouga / Erg Chebbi, southeastern Morocco

The largest hot desert on Earth, met at its most iconic in Morocco's Erg Chebbi — a sea of towering, rippling dunes that glow gold and rose at dawn and dusk beneath some of the clearest, darkest skies anywhere.

Desert & dunes Africa

Bardenas Reales

Navarre, northern Spain

A semi-desert of pale clay badlands in northern Spain — wind- and water-carved ravines, flat-topped mesas, and lone earth pillars that look transplanted from the American West.

Desert & dunes Europe

Death Valley

California / Nevada, United States

The hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America — a vast desert of salt flats, sculpted dunes, and painted badlands that, against all odds, bursts into wildflowers after rare rains.

Desert & dunes North America

Dune du Pilat

Arcachon Bay, Gironde, southwestern France

The tallest sand dune in Europe — a vast wave of pale sand over 100 metres high, poised between a great pine forest and the Atlantic on France's southwest coast.

Desert & dunes Europe

Joshua Tree National Park

Southern California, USA, between Twentynine Palms and Interstate 10, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles

Where two deserts meet: shaggy Joshua trees and piles of rounded monzogranite boulders spread across nearly 800,000 acres of southern California, with dark night skies and a long drop into the lower Colorado Desert.

Desert & dunes North America

Lut Desert

Kerman & Sistan provinces, southeastern Iran

One of the hottest and most surreal deserts on Earth — a sea of wind-carved ridges called kaluts that stretch to the horizon, where satellites have recorded record land-surface temperatures.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Makgadikgadi Pans

Northeastern Botswana, between Nata and Maun

Some of the largest salt pans on Earth — the dried floor of an ancient lake in the Kalahari, a blinding white plain that floods in the rains and draws zebra, wildebeest and flamingos.

Desert & dunes Africa

Médanos de Coro

Médanos Isthmus, beside the city of Coro, Falcón state, Venezuela

A sea of wind-sculpted sand dunes up to 40 metres high on the isthmus north of Coro — Venezuela's desert, constantly reshaped by the wind, a short drive from a colonial city.

Desert & dunes Latin America

Słowiński Sand Dunes

Słowiński National Park, Pomerania, Poland

Europe's largest field of shifting sand dunes — a wandering desert on Poland's Baltic coast, where wind-driven dunes rise dozens of metres and creep inland, burying forest as they go, between the sea and Lake Łebsko.

Desert & dunes Europe

Tatacoa Desert

Huila, Colombia

A labyrinth of eroded red and grey badlands in Colombia's Huila department — not a true desert but a dry tropical forest sculpted into ochre canyons and ashen gullies, and one of the country's finest places to watch the stars.

Desert & dunes Latin America

The Atacama Desert

Northern Chile

The driest nonpolar desert on Earth — a surreal high-altitude landscape of salt flats, sculpted dunes, geyser fields, and flamingo-dotted lagoons, under some of the clearest night skies anywhere.

Desert & dunes Latin America

The Gobi Desert

Southern Mongolia (and northern China)

A vast cold desert of gravel plains, singing sand dunes, and flaming red cliffs — a land of extremes where dinosaur fossils weather out of the rock and Bactrian camels cross the steppe.

Desert & dunes East Asia

The Wahiba Sands

Ash Sharqiyah, eastern Oman

A sea of red-gold dunes rolling for well over a hundred kilometres across eastern Oman — classic Arabian desert, home to the Bedouin and their camels.

Desert & dunes Middle East

The White Desert

Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt

A dreamlike stretch of Egypt's Western Desert where wind has carved a vanished chalk seabed into ghostly white boulders shaped like mushrooms, icebergs, and sculptures.

Desert & dunes Africa

Wadi Al-Hitan

Faiyum Governorate, Western Desert, Egypt

A stretch of Egyptian desert holding the best fossil record anywhere of whales learning to leave the land — hundreds of skeletons of archaic whales, some still with hind legs, lying where a shallow sea left them.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Wadi Rum

Southern Jordan

The 'Valley of the Moon' — a vast desert of red and gold sand studded with towering sandstone and granite mountains, sculpted by wind into arches, canyons, and sheer cliffs beneath enormous skies.

Desert & dunes Middle East

White Sands

Tularosa Basin, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA

The largest gypsum dunefield on Earth — 710 km² of brilliant white dunes in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, protected in White Sands National Park and surrounded by a missile range.

Desert & dunes North America