playa

Spanish playa means "beach" or "shore," from Vulgar Latin plagia, from Greek plagios, "sideways" or "slanting"—describing the sloping ground where land meets water. In Spain and Latin America, playa is an ordinary word. Every coastal town has its playa. It carries no connotation of emptiness.

In the American Southwest, Spanish-speaking settlers applied playa to the flat, dry lakebeds that appear in desert basins. These were places where water occasionally collected during rare rains, forming shallow temporary lakes that evaporated in days or weeks, leaving a hard, flat crust of clay and salt. The beach with no ocean. American geologists adopted the term in the 19th century.

The most famous playa in the world is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada—a playa so flat and hard that it was used to set land speed records. In 1997, Andy Green drove Thrust SSC to 763 miles per hour on the Black Rock playa, the first car to break the sound barrier. Since 1991, the playa has hosted Burning Man, an annual gathering that relies on the lakebed's surreal flatness.

Playas exist on Mars. The Curiosity rover has photographed ancient playa deposits in Gale Crater, confirming that liquid water once pooled and evaporated on the Martian surface. The Spanish word for a Mediterranean beach now describes features on another planet. From Málaga to Mars in five centuries.