Huacachina is the only natural desert oasis in South America: a palm-ringed lagoon of olive-green water sitting in a hollow among the dunes of the Ica Desert, four hours south of Lima. Peru once printed it on the back of the fifty-sol note. Barely a hundred people live year-round along its few streets, and the dunes around it rise as high as small mountains, high enough to hide the place completely until you are almost on top of it. The name is Quechua and means something close to weeping woman, and there is a story attached to it. The lagoon itself is small — barely two hectares of water, and nowhere more than about three metres deep. What no story explains away is the sight itself: a sheet of water and a fringe of green marooned in one of the driest deserts on Earth.
The desert is the real draw. Sand buggies roar over the ridgelines while riders drop down the steep faces on sandboards. Climb the tallest slope and you can watch the sun sink into a sea of sand, the light shifting from white to gold to copper. Below, paddle boats drift on the still green water in the shade of the palms. But the oasis you see is now kept alive by hand. Decades of well-drilling for nearby farms drained the aquifer that fed it, and by the late 1970s the lagoon had all but disappeared. Since 2015 authorities have pumped water in from outside to hold the level steady. What looks like an accident of nature is today a landscape sustained on purpose, and it is no less startling to come upon for that.