The oasis of Huacachina sits in a hollow surrounded by some of the highest dunes in South America. A few palm-shaded hotels, restaurants, and bars ring the lagoon, and the whole place takes about ten minutes to walk around. The water is opaque and slightly sulphurous — swimming is not recommended — but the setting is genuinely spectacular, especially in the late afternoon when the sun turns the dunes gold.
Sandboarding and dune-buggy tours leave from the oasis every afternoon. A typical two-hour outing involves a hair-raising buggy ride over the dunes followed by several long boarding runs down the slopes — exhilarating, dusty, and worth the modest fee. Sunset on top of the dunes, with the oasis below and nothing but sand to the horizon, is the moment most visitors remember.