Uyuni Train Cemetery

The Uyuni Train Cemetery geocache (GC6QJBD) sits at the edge of the Uyuni salt flat, the largest salt desert in the world, in Bolivia. Dozens of steam locomotives and carriages have been rusting there in the open air since the 1940s, still linked to the town by the tracks they once ran on.

These machines are British. The network was built between 1888 and 1892 by engineers who came from England and formed a large community at Uyuni, on the initiative of president Aniceto Arce, convinced that Bolivia would prosper through the railway. The indigenous peoples, for their part, saw an intrusion in it and regularly sabotaged the works. The town became the crossroads from which tin and silver set off for the Pacific ports. When the mining industry collapsed in the 1940s, partly for want of deposits, the trains simply stayed there.

The site is today the most photographed stop of the salt-flat tours, where visitors climb on carcasses that corrosion redraws from one year to the next. The cache, placed in August 2016 by gcuyuni, was chosen "geocache of the week" in January 2022, then kept in the selection of the best caches of the year. It is easily found in the middle of a place swarming with visitors, and the owner asks that the local guides not be let in on the secret.