A vast high plateau in the far northwest of Argentina, the Puna de Atacama is “how the planet looked before us, almost before anything, the Earth’s skeleton laid bare”, said Stanley Stewart in the Financial Times .

It is contiguous with the Atacama Desert in Chile, but receives a bit more rain, and far fewer visitors. Covered in volcanoes, bubbling hot springs, steaming fumaroles and immense salt flats, the landscape here is “dramatic and surreal”. It unfolds across “unfathomable” distances and is wreathed in “profound” stillness and silence. It feels harsh and alien – Martian, perhaps – and yet the Puna is astonishingly beautiful, “streaked with colour as if by a child let loose with crayons – carnelian and rust reds, magnesium greys, chalky white, obsidian black, malachite green”.

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