🇧🇴 Bolivia · Altiplano and the Andean west
If La Paz surprises you by being tucked into a bowl, El Alto surprises you for the exact opposite reason: it's the city that looks down on La Paz, set on the edge of the altiplano at more than 4,000 meters, on a very high plain swept by wind and sun. From its rim, the famous 'ceja' of El Alto, you get one of the most impressive natural lookouts in the world: below you opens the bowl of La Paz, with the city spilling away into the distance and the snow-capped Illimani closing off the horizon.
El Alto is a young city, mostly Aymara, vibrant and proud, which in a few decades went from being a periphery of La Paz to one of the biggest and most dynamic cities in Bolivia. It's the city of endless markets —led by the colossal Feria 16 de Julio, one of the largest in South America—, of Aymara popular culture at its purest, of the new architecture of the 'cholets' (those colored palaces by the architect Freddy Mamani that reinvented Andean aesthetics) and of a social and political energy that has shaped the country's recent history.
This guide covers the essentials of El Alto with a practical and warm eye: how to come up from La Paz by cable car, when to go for the market, which lookouts not to miss, how to appreciate neo-Andean architecture and how to get around a huge city that isn't designed for the conventional tourist but hands you an authentic, revealing experience. El Alto isn't a polished postcard: it's working-class, real, thriving Bolivia, and it's very much worth getting to know.
The altiplano on which El Alto sits was, for thousands of years, the territory of Andean peoples: first under Tiwanaku influence (the great site of Tiwanaku is relatively close, on the same altiplano), then under Aymara lordships and, finally, under the Inca Empire. Across that plain ran the routes linking Lake Titicaca with the bowl of La Paz and the valleys. Through the colonial period and much of the republican one, the area was rural, with haciendas and Aymara communities, and worked as the high 'entrance' to La Paz. The great growth came in the 20th century: the arrival of the railway and the airport, and above all the great migrations from countryside to city —driven by droughts, the 1953 land reform and, later, the mining crises of the 1980s that pushed out thousands of miners— rapidly filled the brow of the altiplano. What began as a set of outlying La Paz neighborhoods became a city in its own right: El Alto split from La Paz as an autonomous municipality in 1985 and was raised to city status in 1988. Since then it has grown at a dizzying pace and become a central actor in Bolivian life, at the heart of decisive episodes such as the 2003 'Gas War'. 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 1950, where close to a million people live today, there was little more than an airport, some railway track and wind-swept tussock grass. El Alto is one of the fastest-growing cities in the Americas: it went from an almost empty plain to a city of a million within a single human lifetime. And yet its ground has a history running back thousands of years: this very high plain, close to Lake Titicaca, was one of the great stages of Andean civilization. For centuries it lay within the orbit of the Tiwanaku culture, whose famous ceremonial center, Tiwanaku, sits on this same altiplano a few dozen kilometers away, and which was one of the most important centers of civilization in pre-Columbian America.
After Tiwanaku's decline, around the 12th century, the altiplano was organized into various Aymara lordships, herding and farming peoples adapted to life at extreme altitude, who grew potatoes, quinoa and other cold-resistant crops and raised llamas and alpacas. Those Aymara roots are the deep foundation of El Alto's identity today: this is now one of the most Aymara cities in the world.
With the Inca expansion in the 15th century, the region was absorbed into the Tawantinsuyu, and across the plain ran the roads linking Lake Titicaca with the future bowl of La Paz and the valleys. When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, the high ground worked as a territory of communities and haciendas and as the 'entrance' to the Choqueyapu valley, where La Paz would be founded. Through the whole colonial period and much of the republican one, what is now El Alto was, above all, rural land you passed through.
Through the first half of the 20th century, the plain above La Paz began to fill up on the back of the capital's growth. The arrival of the railway and, above all, the building of the airport on the altiplano (the only flat, wide ground available to a city as boxed in as La Paz) drew activity, workers and the first stable settlements. Neighborhoods started to form on the high ground, tied to transport, trade and fledgling industry.
The great demographic leap came with migration from countryside to city. The National Revolution of 1952 and the land reform of 1953 transformed Bolivian agriculture and set the rural population moving; droughts and successive crises pushed many Aymara families from the altiplano towards the city. But the decisive blow came in the 1980s: the severe crisis in state mining, with mines closing and thousands of workers 'relocated', threw waves of impoverished miners and farmers towards the cities, and many settled on the affordable, accessible high ground above La Paz.
Those neighborhoods, until then dependent on the capital, grew explosively until they formed a real city. The population was overwhelmingly Aymara and of migrant origin, with a strong culture of work, trade and neighborhood organization. The high ground stopped being a mere periphery and became a world of its own, with its identity, its markets, its neighborhood councils and its enormous demographic weight.
As the high ground turned into an immense city of hundreds of thousands, so did the awareness of its own identity and the demand for autonomy from La Paz. Residents felt their needs —basic services, water, transport, infrastructure— were being pushed aside in favor of central La Paz, and they called for a government of their own to serve a population that was already huge.
That ambition came to fruition in the second half of the 1980s. In March 1985, Law 728 created the Fourth Municipal Section of Murillo province, administratively separating El Alto from La Paz; in September 1988, Law 1014 raised it to city status. So one of the youngest and at the same time most populous cities in Bolivia was officially born, with an institutional life of its own. For all its youth as an administrative entity, El Alto already carried a dense social history and a powerful identity.
The new city went on growing at a dizzying pace, becoming within a few decades one of the largest in the country and a worldwide case study in rapid urbanization at high altitude. Its economy rested on trade (with gigantic markets like the Feria 16 de Julio), transport, small industry and informal work, sustained by a young, enterprising population deeply organized around neighborhood councils and trade guilds.
If there is a moment when El Alto earned a central place in Bolivia's contemporary history, it was October 2003, during the so-called 'Gas War'. The conflict broke out over popular rejection of a plan to export Bolivian natural gas through a Chilean port, on terms that broad sections of society considered damaging to the country, against a backdrop of deep social and economic unrest.
El Alto, because of its strategic position —it controls the approaches to La Paz and the airport— and its powerful neighborhood organization, became the epicenter of the protests. The city mounted blockades, marches and a mass resistance that paralyzed the country. The repression of those days left a tragic toll of dozens dead, above all in El Alto, in one of the most painful episodes of recent Bolivian history.
The social pressure was such that President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was forced to resign on 17 October 2003 and leave the country. The 'Gas War' marked a political turning point: it made visible the enormous weight of El Alto and of the Indigenous and working-class social movements, and opened the way to deep transformations in national politics in the years that followed. From then on, El Alto carried the reputation of a rebellious, combative city, capable of making those in power tremble.
El Alto is, above all, the great contemporary Aymara city: a place where Andean identity was not left behind in the countryside or in the past, but reinvented in an urban, thriving, proud key. The Aymara language, the traditional dress of the cholas (pollera, shawl, bowler hat), the festivals, the challas and offerings to Pachamama, and a very dense network of markets and guilds all coexist with modernity, mobile phones, cars and the global economy.
The city runs on trade and work. The Feria 16 de Julio, set up on Thursdays and Sundays, is one of the largest open-air markets in South America, where absolutely everything is sold. That informal-and-formal economy produced a prosperous new Aymara middle class that wanted to express its success in architecture too.
Out of that came the famous 'cholets', the buildings with multicolored facades and exuberant forms that became El Alto's most recognizable image. Their main creator, the El Alto architect Freddy Mamani, developed a style christened 'neo-Andean architecture', which reinterprets the colors and motifs of Aymara and Tiwanaku art in dazzling constructions, with spectacularly decorated ballrooms. Along with phenomena such as the 'cholitas' wrestling, these palaces turned El Alto into a symbol of a modern Andean identity, self-assured and deeply original, which left behind the image of a mere periphery to claim its place as one of the most singular cities in the Americas.