20 Star Wars locations you can visit in real life

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

The Last Jedi divided fans, we know this, but there is surely no denying that the scene in which the Rebels fight the First Order on Crait, with red smoke from their engines contrasting with the perfectly white salt flats, is a perfect shot. It just is.

The scene was filmed on the world’s largest salt flat, located in South America. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia spans 4086 square miles, and its appearance in The Last Jedi marks its silver screen debut.

The flat is what remains of several prehistoric lakes and its large, extraordinarily flat area provides, in the words of National Geographic, an “endless horizon that allows photographers to play with perspective and depth of field.”

Get ready for your Instagram money shot, and remember to take a prop. National Geographic, for instance, suggests staging battles with toy dinosaurs, but we recommend taking a Star Wars figurine to really keep in with the theme. You are visiting Crait, after all.

It is a tourist attraction, so there are plenty of tours that cover the area, and it is even home to the world’s first salt hotel, which is, as you might expect, entirely made from salt. Yes, including the desks and the floor. Everything is salt.

You might also expect such an otherworldly landscape to be fairly inhospitable to wildlife, but it’s actually a breeding ground for flamingoes (although they lay one egg a year each and mate for life, so take breeding loosely — their population is dwindling because they love each other!).

Salar de Uyuni has five stars on TripAdvisor and nary a review that dips below “Excellent,” with the most recent visitors describing it as “stunning” and “like a dream.” Definitely add this location to your travel list, Star Wars fans. It’s already on ours.