South America's Hidden Gems Most Tourists Never Find
Every year, millions of travellers flock to Machu Picchu, the Amazon, and Rio de Janeiro. And yes — they are magnificent. But if you're the kind of traveller who leans toward the lesser-known road, who finds magic in the places that don't have queues or ticket counters, then this guide is for you.
We've spent years curating tours to South America's most compelling corners. These are the places that make our guides go quiet and our clients write emails saying "I've never experienced anything like that in my life." From salt flats that mirror the sky to cities carved into mountainsides that Google Maps barely knows exist — welcome to the real South America.
In This Guide
Salar de Uyuni at Dusk, Bolivia
Ciudad Perdida, Colombia
Huacachina Oasis, Peru
Quilotoa Crater Lake, Ecuador
Palomino, Colombia
The Northern Pantanal, Brazil
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay
Valle de la Luna, Chile
Rupununi Savannah, Guyana
Gran Chaco, Paraguay
Bolivia
Salar de Uyuni
at the Edge of Day
The world's largest mirror — and most underrated sunset venue
Everyone's seen the photo — a person standing on an infinite reflective plain, sky perfectly doubled beneath their feet. What those photos never capture is the silence. At 3,656 metres above sea level, the Bolivian altiplano is so still that you can hear your own heartbeat. Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat at over 10,000 square kilometres, is nothing short of otherworldly.
The famous mirror effect happens after light rainfall, when a thin film of water turns the salt crust into a near-perfect reflector. Most group tours visit at midday for convenience — a mistake. The real magic unfolds at dusk, when the reflected sunset ignites the entire horizon in amber and violet, and the boundary between earth and sky dissolves completely. Watching stars emerge from below you as much as above is a disorientation you'll spend years trying to describe to people who weren't there.
Beyond the flats themselves, the surrounding region harbours red and green mineral lagoons, active geysers at sunrise, and the surreal Isla Incahuasi — a cactus-covered island rising from the salt like a mirage.
Insider Tips
Best season: December–April for mirror effect
Stay in a salt hotel near the flats — they're real
Sunrise at geysers requires a 4AM start (worth every second)
Altitude: acclimatise in Potosí before arriving
Colombia
Ciudad Perdida —
The Lost City
Older than Machu Picchu, and still largely unknown
Built around 800 AD, some 650 years before the Inca constructed Machu Picchu, Colombia's Ciudad Perdida — "The Lost City" — is one of the ancient world's most spectacular settlements. Founded by the Tayrona people and hidden deep in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, it was rediscovered only in 1972 and remains one of the least-visited major archaeological sites in all of South America.
The journey there is itself the experience. A four-to-six-day jungle trek through humid cloud forest, river crossings with your boots hung around your neck, and nights in open-air camps where the air smells of rain and earth. The final approach — 1,200 stone steps ascending through mist — delivers you to a terraced city frozen in time, where the only sounds are birds and the distant rush of water.
Unlike Machu Picchu, there are no day-trippers, no gift shops at the gate, and no cable car shortcut. It's an earned experience — and one that changes people.
Insider Tips
Trek only with licensed operators (mandatory)
Dry season: December–March, July–August
Permit required — book at least 3 weeks ahead
Bring cash; no ATMs after Santa Marta
"The continent doesn't ask you to choose between adventure and beauty. It insists you take both, simultaneously, until you're not quite sure what ordinary feels like anymore."
— TourRer South America Travel Team
Peru
Huacachina —
Desert Lagoon Mirage
A natural oasis ringed by towering sand dunes
An oasis. An actual desert oasis — the kind you thought only existed in cartoons and fairy tales. Huacachina sits in the middle of Peru's coastal desert, a palm-fringed lagoon of jade-green water nestled between sand dunes that rise to 100 metres. The town has a population of just a few hundred people, most of whom are connected to the small hotels and restaurants built right up to the water's edge.
Sandboarding down the dune faces at sunset is one of the most exhilarating things you can do in South America — a rush of speed with a soft landing in warm sand, the Pacific just visible on the horizon. But the quieter pleasure is simply sitting at the lagoon at dusk with a cold Peruvian beer, watching the dunes change colour from gold to rose to deep ochre as the light fades. Huacachina is small enough that you can walk around the entire lagoon in fifteen minutes. The intimacy is its greatest gift.
Insider Tips
Visit year-round — desert climate is stable
Book sandboarding at dusk, not midday
Combine with Nazca Lines (2-hour drive south)
Ica pisco is world-class — try a distillery tour
Ecuador
Quilotoa —
The Turquoise Caldera
A volcanic crater lake that shouldn't exist this high up
At 3,914 metres in the Ecuadorian Andes, Quilotoa is a crater lake formed by the collapse of a volcano approximately 800 years ago. What fills that crater is a lake of impossible colour — deep turquoise shading to emerald and jade depending on the sky and the time of day, ringed by the eroded walls of the ancient volcano. From the rim, the view is so startling it temporarily rearranges your understanding of what landscape can look like.
The Quilotoa Loop — a 3-to-4-day trek through indigenous Quechua villages, high-altitude market towns, and dramatic canyon scenery — is one of Ecuador's finest hiking routes. You'll stay in family-run hostels where dinner is served by firelight and the hosts might be weavers, farmers, or both. The area has barely changed since roads arrived in the 1990s, and the warmth of the communities along the route is something that stays with you long after the photos fade.
Insider Tips
Best months: June–September (dry season)
Multi-day loop beats single-day visit dramatically
Mules available for baggage transport
Arrive at rim by 8AM before cloud rolls in
Colombia
Palomino —
Where Mountains Touch Sea
Caribbean jungle with the Sierra Nevada as a backdrop
Palomino is the kind of place that travel writers stumble onto, write breathlessly about, and then pray doesn't get too popular too quickly. A small coastal village on Colombia's Caribbean coast, it sits at the precise junction where the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta — the world's highest coastal mountain range — meets the sea. Snow-capped peaks visible from the beach. That combination alone makes it surreal.
The Palomino River runs cold and clear from the mountains, winding through jungle before meeting the warm Caribbean. Tubing down it — drifting through dense green canopy and out into ocean surf — is the region's signature experience, and it costs almost nothing. The village is still small enough that the best food comes from home kitchens, where local women cook fresh fish with coconut rice on wood fires. The accommodation ranges from hammock guesthouses to boutique jungle lodges with plunge pools. There is no bad option.
Insider Tips
Best months: December–April
River tubing: mornings only before currents pick up
No ATMs in town — bring cash from Santa Marta
Pairs perfectly with nearby Tayrona National Park
Brazil
The Northern Pantanal —
A Wildlife Density That Defies Belief
The world's largest tropical wetland, and its best-kept safari secret
While everyone goes to the Amazon for wildlife, those in the know go to the Pantanal. Brazil's Northern Pantanal — particularly the Transpantaneira road corridor in Mato Grosso — offers wildlife sightings that rival anything in Africa, without the crowds or the price. The numbers are staggering: over 10 million caimans, 700 bird species, and the densest jaguar population on Earth.
Jaguar sightings here are so reliable that specialist lodges offer photography safaris along the Cuiabá River where big cats lounge on riverbanks in open daylight, hunting caimans in the shallows. Giant otters fishing cooperatively. Hundreds of hyacinth macaws — the world's largest flying parrot, an electric cobalt blue — roosting in palms at sunset. A place where the wildlife doesn't hide, because it's never had reason to.
Insider Tips
Dry season (July–October) = best wildlife viewing
Cuiabá is the gateway city — fly from São Paulo
Book jaguar safaris at least 4 months in advance
Mosquito protection essential; bring reef-safe repellent
Uruguay
Colonia del Sacramento —
A Time Warp on the River Plate
The most elegant small town in South America
Across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires — a single hour on a high-speed ferry — lies one of South America's most beguiling and undervisited towns. Colonia del Sacramento's historic quarter is a UNESCO-listed colonial labyrinth of cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-draped walls, and buildings that have stood since Portuguese settlers arrived in 1680. It's tiny enough to explore entirely on foot, and empty enough — outside of Argentine weekend escapes — that you can wander without seeing another tourist for long stretches.
There's an almost theatrical quality to Colonia's late-afternoon light. The River Plate turns to copper; the old lighthouse casts long shadows across the barrio; the sound of tango drifts from a bar two streets away. Hire a golf cart and explore the surrounding coastline, where small estancias offer asado lunches with homemade dulce de leche. Uruguay is, mile for mile, one of South America's most civilised and underrated countries — and Colonia is its sweetest corner.
Insider Tips
Stay overnight — day-trippers miss the best light
Ferry from Buenos Aires: Buquebus (1 hour)
Best months: October–April
Combine with Punta del Este and Montevideo
Chile
Valle de la Luna —
Mars, From Earth
The driest place on Earth, and its most alien landscape
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest non-polar desert on Earth — some parts have recorded no rainfall in over 400 years. Within it, Valle de la Luna ("Valley of the Moon") is a surreal sweep of salt formations, clay ridges, and eroded dunes so texturally complex and colour-layered that the comparison to a lunar or Martian surface doesn't feel like hyperbole. NASA tests Mars rovers nearby. The landscape genuinely resembles another planet.
Sunrise from the Tres Marias formations is indescribable. The Atacama's altitude and bone-dry air produce stargazing that astronomers describe as among the best on the planet — the region hosts more major observatories per square kilometre than anywhere on Earth. At night, the Milky Way becomes not a suggestion but a vast luminous river overhead, and the silence is so complete that first-time visitors sometimes find it unsettling.
Insider Tips
Arrive for sunset: colours shift from white to gold to pink
Stargazing tours from San Pedro: book in advance
Altitude 2,400m — easy acclimatisation, no altitude illness
Combine with El Tatio geysers (4,500m) at dawn
Guyana
The Rupununi Savannah —
South America's Final Frontier
Giant anteaters, harpy eagles, and a horizon without fences
Guyana is one of the least-visited countries in the Western Hemisphere — and its Rupununi region is the country's most spectacular secret. A vast savannah stretching to the Brazilian border, dotted with forested tepuis (flat-topped mountains), braided rivers, and indigenous Makushi and Wapishana communities who have lived here for millennia, the Rupununi feels like a landscape from the deep past.
Wildlife here exists without the infrastructure of more famous destinations — giant anteaters forage in the open; arapaima (one of the world's largest freshwater fish) breach in blackwater rivers; harpy eagles — Earth's most powerful raptor — nest in emergent rainforest trees. The main "road" becomes impassable in wet season. The lodges are small, community-owned, and run by families who track jaguars by moonlight and know the name of every tree. This is for travellers who want something they can't find anywhere else on the continent.
Insider Tips
Dry season only: September–April
Fly Georgetown → Lethem (small prop plane, spectacular)
Book eco-lodges through community tourism networks
Yellow fever vaccination required for Guyana
Paraguay
Gran Chaco —
The Forgotten Wilderness
South America's most overlooked and wildlife-rich ecosystem
Paraguay rarely appears in anyone's South America itinerary. Which is precisely why the Gran Chaco — a vast dry forest covering most of western Paraguay, parts of Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil — remains one of the continent's great ecological wildernesses. The second-largest forest ecosystem in South America after the Amazon, it's home to giant armadillos, tapirs, pumas, howler monkeys, and over 500 bird species, almost none of them visible in the places tourists actually go.
The small Mennonite farming communities of central Chaco are a phenomenon in themselves — a society of deeply conservative German-speaking settlers who arrived in the 1920s and built one of the most productive dairy industries in South America in the middle of a wilderness. The cultural collision of traditions here — indigenous Guaraní communities, Mennonite settlements, working cattle ranches — makes the Chaco a place of genuine anthropological fascination, as well as wild, unphotographed beauty.
Insider Tips
Dry season: May–October (roads viable)
Tallest accessible wilderness at ground level in S. America
Budget extra days; distances between lodges are vast
Combine with Asunción, one of South America's coolest cities
The Common Thread
What unites every one of these destinations is the feeling they leave behind — not just memories of extraordinary things seen, but a fundamental recalibration of what travel can be. These are places that return something to you. A sense of scale, of wildness, of a world that exists entirely outside of screens and schedules.
South America doesn't yield its best moments to the passive traveller. But for those willing to take a slow boat on a blackwater river, climb a sand dune in the dark, or spend three days in a jungle before they see what they came for — the continent becomes one of the most generous places on Earth.
At TourRer, every South America tour we create is built around exactly this philosophy. Not the highlights you've already seen. The ones you haven't imagined yet.