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A Traveler's Guide to Visiting the Salar de Uyuni

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Home » Accidents in Uyuni–Updated List of Recorded Accidents on Salt Flat Tours

Accidents in Uyuni–Updated List of Recorded Accidents on Salt Flat Tours

Note: I do my best to keep this updated as much as possible.

If there's an accident that you're aware of that isn't listed, please don't hesitate to let me know and I will add it to the list.

Unfortunately, Uyuni can be a dangerous place.

Accidents, even deadly ones, are not terribly rare in organized tours on the salt flats. Once you get into that jeep, you're 100% in the hands of your driver. 

Lonely Planet even claimed in 2008 that as many as 18 people had died in only a few months.

In a greater effort to add more transparency to the tourism industry in the salt flats, we've decided to publish a list of all serious accidents that we could identify happening on salt flat tours. At this time, we're only publishing accidents that we can verify via publication in newspapers--reports in Tripadvisor are not enough to warrant inclusion.

Keep in mind, it seems that local newspapers are more likely to identify the tour agencies that were involved in the accidents--whereas international news sources are less likely to report the names of the agencies. 

For this reason, most of the links below are originally written in Spanish, and translated by myself into the "details" column.

Date

URL

Agencies Involved

Details

May 3rd, 2008

Link

Kantuta, Naturs

Head-on crash

July 15th, 2008

​Link

Colque Tours

Vehicle flipped

April 7th, 2011

Link

Ripley Tours

Vehicle flipped

March 17th, 2014

Link

Yoerva Tours, Transporte Asunción

Head-on crash

July 31st, 2016

Link

San Juan

Vehicle flipped

July 10th, 2017

Link

Sumaj Jallpa

Vehicles flipped, tourists on top of car

Oct 10th, 2018

Link

Not specified

Vehicle flipped

Aug 2nd, 2017

Link

Not specified

Vehicle flipped

July 27, 2012

Link

Andrea Tours

Vehicle flipped

March 24th, 2017

Link

Ripley Tours

Vehicle flipped

July 31st, 2017

Link

Not specified

Vehicle flipped

April 17th, 2017

Link

Tito Tours

Vehicle flipped

July 19th, 2017

Link

Tres Gigantes

Tour guide involved in shootings

June 10th, 2019

Link; English Link; Link

Callpa Tours

Vehicle flipped

July 21st, 2019

Link

Expediciones Huracán

Vehicle flipped

Sept 27, 2019

Link

Sol de Mañana

Two Vehicles Collided on salt flats

If you know of an accident that we've missed, and can send us over a newspaper story about it, we'll be happy to add it to the list.

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