Then there are the salt flats, the lagoons, Death Valley, the flamingo reserves … San Pedro's dusty streets may be thronged with tourists, but it is still an appealing, easygoing huaso (cowboy) town: one-storey adobe buildings, a leafy main square with an archetypal Andean church; an excellent archaeological museum.
Most sewage from the camps was collected by trucks and dumped untreated in lagoons at a waste site only metres from the sea, or anywhere out of sight.
We believe tidal lagoons have really significant potential in the UK, and could start contributing to UK energy needs as early as the end of the decade.
The world's driest desert is Earth's most Mars-like environment, with its vast salt flats and coloured lagoons.
Unique to these Adriatic lagoons are the casoni, spartan fishermen's huts built on isolated sandflats from canna palustre, bamboo-like reeds that grow in these estuaries.
Tables and benches are set in the sand on a bluff above either glassy lagoons or frothy Atlantic rollers, depending on the tide.
At 6.30am, as we drive between lagoons across Mandaitivu and Velanai islands, fishermen are dragging nets on foot or snorkelling to little prawn farms in the shallow water.
And this is just the beginning of a spider's web of wetlands – lagoons, canals, deltas and wildlife reserves – that line the Adriatic as far as north Trieste.
After Aquilea fell to the armies of Atilla the Hun, it was to the lagoons that people fled, founding first Grado and then Venice itself.
In developing countries the pig-effluent collects in open lagoons which smell bad and get infested with flies.
When Kiribati, another country of sun-baked atolls and lagoons just to the south, had links with Beijing, it allowed the Chinese to build a satellite-tracking station on the island of Tarawa.
