Tears of the Mountain

In a time when gods left footprints as wide as lakes and their heads towered over clouds, there was once a mountain goddess called Tunupa. Legend has it her husband abandoned her for another woman. Heartbroken and distraught, Tunupa cried while breastfeeding her child. The water from her tears and the milk from her breasts mingled to form the largest salt flat in the world—the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Tunupa has since been immortalised as a mountain, which bears her name, by the Aymara people of the Ande