Death Valley (Panamint: Tümpisa [tɨmbiʃa]) is a desert valley in Eastern California, United States, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. The World Meteorological Organization lists Death Valley as the site of the hottest surface temperature recorded on Earth.

Death Valley's Badwater Basin is the point of lowest elevation in North America, at 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. It is 84.6 miles (136.2 km) east-southeast of Mount Whitney – the highest point in the contiguous United States, with an elevation of 14,505 feet (4,421 m). On the afternoon hours of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a temperature of 134 °F (56.7 °C) at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, which stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth. However, this reading and several others taken in that period are disputed by some modern experts.

Lying mostly in Inyo County, California, near the border of California and Nevada, in the Great Basin, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Death Valley constitutes much of Death Valley National Park and is the principal feature of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve. It runs from north to south between the Amargosa Range on the east and the Panamint Range on the west. The Grapevine Mountains and the Owlshead Mountains form its northern and southern boundaries, respectively. It has an area of about 3,000 sq mi (7,800 km²). The highest point in Death Valley National Park is Telescope Peak, in the Panamint Range, which has an elevation of 11,043 feet (3,366 m).

Death Valley is home to the Timbisha tribe of Native Americans, formerly known as the Panamint Shoshone. They have inhabited the valley for at least the past millennium. Their name for Death Valley is Tümpisa, meaning "rock paint". This is refers to presence of red ochre in the valley.

The valley got the name Death Valley in the winter of 1849–1850 when a group of American pioneers were traveling through on their way to the California gold rush. The Death Valley 49ers got lost in the valley and feared that they would all perish there. They did eventually make their way out after suffering the loss of just one of the group.

Death Valley is a graben—a downdropped block of land between two mountain ranges. It lies at the southern end of a geological trough, Walker Lane, which runs north to Oregon. The valley is bisected by a right lateral strike slip fault system, comprising the Death Valley Fault and the Furnace Creek Fault. The eastern end of the left lateral Garlock Fault intersects the Death Valley Fault. Furnace Creek and the Amargosa River flow through part of the valley and eventually disappear into the sands of the valley floor.

Death Valley also contains salt pans. According to current geological consensus, at various times during the middle of the Pleistocene era, which ended roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago, an inland lake, Lake Manly, formed in Death Valley. The lake was nearly 100 miles (160 km) long and 600 feet (180 m) deep, the end-basin in a chain of lakes that began with Mono Lake in the north and continued through basins down the Owens River Valley, through Searles and China Lakes and the Panamint Valley, to the immediate west.

As the area turned to desert the water evaporated, leaving an abundance of evaporitic salts, such as common sodium salts and borax, which were later exploited during the modern history of the region, primarily 1883 to 1907.