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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
