🇧🇴 Bolivia · Altiplano and the Andean west
Out on the La Paz altiplano, southwest of the city and at around 4,000 meters, sits Coro Coro, a town whose name was tied for decades to one of the metals that made history in Bolivia: copper. Capital of Pacajes province, Coro Coro was famous for its native copper mines, known for their purity, and for an extractive industry that shaped the life of the region and left its mark on the landscape and on local memory.
Today Coro Coro is a quiet town with a strong Aymara identity, where the mining past sits alongside everyday altiplano life: herding, high-altitude fields and the unhurried rhythm of the plateau. It isn't a destination for crowds or developed tourist infrastructure, but a place for anyone after the most authentic altiplano, the history of Bolivian mining and the immense, bare landscapes of the puna.
This guide covers Coro Coro with a practical and honest eye: what there is to see in the town and around it, how to get there from La Paz and El Alto, what to bear in mind about the altitude and the remoteness, and how to place it within Bolivia's great mining story. It's a niche destination, ideal for curious travelers willing to step off the busier circuits.
The history of Coro Coro is written in copper. This town on the La Paz altiplano, in Pacajes province, owes its fame to its copper deposits, which through the 19th century and much of the 20th made it one of the country's main producing centers. The region was inhabited from pre-Hispanic times by Aymara peoples, heirs to the ancient altiplano culture, and it kept those strong Indigenous roots even during the mining boom. Coro Coro became famous for the quality of its native copper —copper that occurs in nature in a practically pure state— much prized for its purity, which earned it an international reputation among mineralogists and collectors. Copper mining drew companies, workers and capital, and gave the town a period of activity and growth, with all the hardship of mining work at altitude. In time, the relative exhaustion of the richest veins, shifts in the metal markets and the difficulties of altiplano mining wound the activity down, and Coro Coro lost the economic weight it once had. In 2009-2012 the Bolivian state restarted production with the Empresa Minera Corocoro (COMIBOL), which runs a hydrometallurgical plant producing high-purity copper cathodes, the first in the country. Today the town combines that renewed state mining with its role as a quiet provincial capital, keeping the traces of that mining past in its church, its buildings and its surroundings. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The altiplano department and the seat of government: cradle of Tiwanaku and of Murillo's revolution, Aymara land beside Lake Titicaca, dominated by the Cordillera Real and its snowcapped Illimani, with the highest seat of government in the world and an Amazonian flank that drops all the way down to the Madidi.
Read the history of La Paz →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In mineralogy museums half the world over there are stones carrying the name of a Bolivian altiplano town of barely a few thousand people: Corocoro. That's no accident. Under this plateau at nearly 4,000 meters lies one of the purest native copper deposits ever found, so singular that it drew British capital and Irish and French miners, and set off a copper-fever cycle that lasted more than a century and that today, after decades of silence, the Bolivian state has started up again.
Long before copper made Coro Coro famous, the region of Pacajes province, in the southwest of the La Paz altiplano, was inhabited by Aymara-speaking peoples, heirs to the long altiplano tradition whose great center was Tiwanaku. These communities developed a culture deeply adapted to life on the puna, at nearly 4,000 meters: herding camelids (llamas and alpacas), growing high-altitude tubers such as the potato and preserving them as chuño, and a social and religious organization closely tied to the land and to the mountain deities.
Pacajes was, in fact, the name of one of the Aymara lordships or peoples of the altiplano region, which says a great deal about the antiquity and weight of the Indigenous presence on this land. Through the Inca period and then the colonial one, the area was folded into wider political structures, but it kept its strong Aymara identity, which survives today in its communities, its language and its customs.
Those Indigenous roots are essential to understanding Coro Coro: even when the town made its name from the copper mining pushed forward in republican times, its surroundings and its people remained essentially Aymara, and that ancestral culture is still the bedrock on which life in the region rests.
What made Coro Coro famous was copper. The region turned out to be extraordinarily rich in deposits of the metal, and very particularly in native copper: copper that occurs in nature in a practically pure state, with no need for complex reduction processes from ores. That native copper from Coro Coro won international renown for its purity and for the quality of its specimens, which reached mineralogy museums and collections in different parts of the world.
The presence of such a prized mineral made Coro Coro a familiar name among geologists, mineralogists and collectors, far out of proportion to its size as a town. The area became associated with the idea of a singular deposit, where nature offered up the metal almost ready to use, a rarity that gave it a prominent place in the history of Bolivian mineralogy.
That wealth was, naturally, the engine of its development. The chance to mine high-quality copper drew the interest of companies, investors and workers, and put Coro Coro on the country's mining map, opening the busiest and most prosperous period in its history.
Coro Coro's great period as a mining center ran through the 19th century and much of the 20th. As early as 1830 to 1870, merchants and immigrants arriving from Ireland, France, England, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Peru, with greater financial muscle and experience in the mining business, took control of copper production in Corocoro and the neighboring Chacarilla district, thanks to their commercial and credit ties with the trading houses of Tacna. That was how the capital was assembled that drove copper mining in the region, geared almost entirely to export.
The great leap came at the start of the 20th century, when the workings were mechanized and passed under international capital. On 6 August 1909, Corocoro United Copper Mines Ltd. was organized under the laws of Great Britain, and it would become the largest copper mine in Bolivia. A whole industrial infrastructure grew around it: processing plants, workers' housing, shops and services, in the classic boom cycle so many altiplano mining centers went through.
As in all high-altitude mining, the work was hard and demanding. Miners faced the difficulties of extracting ore at nearly 4,000 meters, with the cold, the thin air and the dangers of working underground. That mining life forged a strong collective identity and left a deep mark on local culture. During the boom, Coro Coro carried economic weight and regional importance, reflected in its status as capital of Pacajes province: the brightest and best-known chapter of its history.
Like so many other mining centers, Coro Coro also lived through the flip side of the boom: the decline. The relative exhaustion of the richest veins, the swings in international copper prices and the structural difficulties of altiplano mining gradually wound down the activity that had been the town's engine, until, for a mix of economic and political reasons, the mining center closed for good after 1985 and much of its workforce left the area, amid the crisis that hit Bolivian state mining after the collapse of international tin prices and the mining relocations of those years.
That process transformed the town. From a thriving mining center it became a quiet altiplano settlement, where life turned once more around the traditional activities of the puna —herding, high-altitude crops— and around its administrative role as capital of Pacajes province. The memory of copper, though, stayed on in the buildings, the mining remains around it and the identity of its people, waiting for a new chapter.
After more than two decades of silence, the name Corocoro returned to Bolivia's mining agenda in 2007, when the government of President Evo Morales announced the restart of the deposit with an initial investment of 18 million dollars, as part of the nationalization and state-mining policy of those years. The project centered on Cerro Viscachani, with a pilot plant for leaching and solvent extraction (the process known as SX-EW), a different technology from that of the old underground mines of the 20th century.
The first copper cathodes of this new stage, at 99.9% purity, came out in 2009, confirming that the old deposit still held quality ore. In 2012, under Supreme Decree No. 1269, the Empresa Minera Corocoro was formally created under the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (Comibol), consolidating the open-pit state operation that today coexists with the memory of the old British mine.
More than a century after foreign capital put Corocoro on the world copper map, it is now the Bolivian state that sustains the town's mining, with output far more modest than at the start of the 20th century, but which keeps the region's mining identity alive. For today's traveler, that double historical layer —the British boom of 1909 and the state restart from 2007 on— is exactly what makes it fascinating to walk a town that, at first glance, looks like just another quiet altiplano settlement.