Travelers often seek out the world’s most dramatic landscapes: the unearthly karst formations of southern China, the stark beauty of Iceland, the dizzying canyons of the American Southwest. But what about the least dramatic landscape, someplace with no ups or downs whatsoever? You’d have to go to remote central Bolivia to find the world’s flattest place. There’s nothing there at all, and it’s absolutely amazing.

Forty thousand years ago, the Altiplano (high plateau) of Bolivia was covered by a vast lake, Lake Minchin. When the lake dried up, it left behind two large salt deserts. Salar de Uyuni, the larger of the two, contains an astounding 10 billion tons of salt and covers over 4,000 square miles. That makes it the largest salt flat in the world, more than 20 times bigger than America’s largest, in Death Valley.

In all of Salar de Uyuni, an area almost as large as the state of Connecticut, there’s no more than a meter’s variation in altitude. That’s so flat that the area is routinely used by satellites to calibrate their instruments. Because the desert is so high, so dry, and reflects so much light, it’s five times better for satellite calibration than even the surface of the ocean. The “mountains” and “valleys” of the Salar may be only a few millimeters in height.

Visitors to Salar de Uyuni often flock to the desert’s “islands,” like Isla Incahuasi. These rocky outcroppings were once volcanoes in the prehistoric lake bed, and today are covered in giant cacti and weird fossilized coral. But during the rainy season, the surface of the salt flats is even more interesting. Instead of draining into the earth, the water forms a thin film over the hexagonal salt tiles. This turns the Salar into one giant mirror—and makes for some eye-popping photo opportunities.

In local myth, the nearby volcano Tunupa was once a goddess whose husband left her for another mountain. Heartbroken, she wept salty tears, which mixed with her breast milk to form the Salar de Uyuni. But the Salar may produce a much happier future for Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. This flat white sea contains as much as 70 percent of the world’s reserves of lithium, now a sought-after component of computer and phone batteries. The Salar de Uyuni may be powering Bolivia’s economy for many years to come.