Long before the Incas and the Spanish, the Bolivian Andes were the cradle of one of the great civilizations of the Americas. Near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, at some 3,850 meters of altitude, there flourished Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco), a ceremonial and political center whose origins go back to the first centuries of our era. The culture consolidated as an expansive State between the years 100 and 400 AD and reached its height roughly between 500 and 1000 AD, when its capital came to house tens of thousands of inhabitants and its influence extended over southern Peru, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina.
The Gateway of the Sun, the great monoliths such as the Bennett and the Ponce, the Akapana pyramid, the semi-subterranean temple and the temples of Kalasasaya bear witness to its extraordinary command of stone, astronomy and hydraulic engineering. Tiwanaku developed raised-field farming systems, the 'suka kollus', which made it possible to produce food in the harshness of the altiplano, and it spread an artistic and religious style —with the central figure of a staff god— that culturally unified much of the south-central Andes. Around the year 1000-1150, a prolonged drought weakened its agricultural base and the center was finally abandoned, giving way to the Aymara kingdoms. Since the year 2000, the complex has been a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The altiplano and the valleys were inhabited by numerous peoples: the Aymara, heirs of the lakeside lordships that succeeded Tiwanaku, such as the powerful Lupaca kingdom, the Pacajes and the Collas; the Quechua of the valleys; the Uru of Titicaca, of the Desaguadero and of Lake Poopó, considered among the oldest inhabitants of the Andes; and, in the lowlands of the east and the south, the Guaraní (Chiriguano), the Moxeño of the Llanos de Moxos, the Chiquitano, the Tacana and dozens of Amazonian and Chaco peoples. That diversity, with Aymara and Quechua still very much alive as the mother tongues of millions of people, remains the deepest trait of Bolivian identity.
In the 15th century, during the reigns of Pachacútec and Túpac Yupanqui, the Incas incorporated the Bolivian altiplano and valleys into their empire, the Tahuantinsuyo, within the great southern region called Collasuyo. The Inca conquest was not straightforward: the Aymara lordships, especially the Collas and Lupacas of Titicaca, put up strong resistance and were subdued only after hard campaigns, keeping much of their language and of their dual organization.
The Incas imposed Quechua as the administrative language, integrated the region into the road network of the Qhapaq Ñan, set up centers such as Incallajta —in the valleys of Cochabamba, the largest Inca architectural complex in present-day Bolivian territory— and moved populations through the mitimaes system to secure the production of maize and coca in the temperate valleys. They also reorganized collective labor through the mita, the rotating contribution of manpower that the Spanish would later turn into an instrument of mining exploitation.
In the eastern lowlands, however, the Inca advance met a limit. The Guaraní or Chiriguano of the Andean foothills halted the expansion of the Tahuantinsuyo, and the peoples of the Amazon and of the Chaco remained outside its orbit. When the Spanish reached the region in the 1530s, the Inca Empire had just plunged into a civil war between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa, a circumstance that made the European conquest enormously easier.
The Spanish conquest of present-day Bolivian territory took place in the 1530s, after the fall of the Inca Empire at the hands of Francisco Pizarro. The region came to be called Charcas or Upper Peru and was organized under the Royal Audiencia of Charcas, created in 1559 by king Philip II, with its seat in the city of La Plata (today's Sucre). This high court administered justice over a vast territory that took in part of present-day Paraguay, southeastern Peru, northern Chile, northwestern Argentina and almost all of Bolivia.
In the early years, the conquistadors fought bloody civil wars between the factions of Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, which ended only with the arrival of royal authority. On the ruins of the Inca order, the Spanish founded strategic cities: La Plata (1538-1540), La Paz (1548), Cochabamba (1571), Tarija (1574) and Santa Cruz de la Sierra (1561). The territory depended first on the Viceroyalty of Peru and, from 1776, on the newly created Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with its capital in Buenos Aires, a change that redirected trade and sowed administrative rivalries.
The event that decided the fate of Charcas was the discovery of silver in the Cerro Rico of Potosí in 1545. Around that wealth the Crown organized an entire colonial system: the mining mita, which forced tens of thousands of Indigenous people from the provinces of the southern Andes to work in shifts in the mines and in the amalgamation mills with mercury brought from Huancavelica. Upper Peru thus became the great silver engine of the Spanish Empire, at an enormous human cost for the Indigenous and African populations subjected to forced labor.
Few places on the planet changed history as much as Potosí. In 1545, according to tradition, the Indigenous man Diego Huallpa discovered the silver of the Sumaq Urqu, the Cerro Rico, and the Crown immediately founded at the foot of the mountain the Villa Imperial de Potosí. Within a few decades it became one of the largest, richest and most populous cities in the world: at the beginning of the 17th century it rivaled London, Paris or Seville in inhabitants, and out of its popular speech came the saying 'vale un potosí' —worth a Potosí— to describe something of incalculable value.
Potosí silver fed a true world economy. Minted in the Casa de la Moneda, it traveled in fleets to Seville and, by way of the Manila galleon, as far as China, financing European wars, global trade and price inflation in the Old World. To sustain such production, viceroy Francisco de Toledo institutionalized the mining mita from 1572 onward: every year, thousands of Indigenous people from a broad range of provinces were taken to Potosí to work in extreme conditions in the galleries of the mountain and in the mills where the metal was refined with mercury.
That splendor had an immense human cost, sustained for almost three centuries. Generations of mitayos and of enslaved Africans died from cave-ins, silicosis, mercury poisoning and exhausting shifts underground. Potosí thus concentrates the two faces of colonial American history: the baroque luxury of its churches and the exploitation that held up the Empire. In recognition of that double condition, Unesco declared the city of Potosí a World Heritage Site in 1987.
Upper Peru was a pioneer of Spanish American emancipation. On May 25, 1809, in the city of Chuquisaca (Sucre), a movement headed by the judges of the Audiencia and by the 'Doctores de Charcas' trained at the University of San Francisco Xavier deposed president Ramón García de León y Pizarro. This is the so-called 'first libertarian cry of the Americas', which came before the juntas of Quito, La Paz, Caracas and Buenos Aires. On July 16, 1809 a more radical revolution broke out in La Paz, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo, which set up a Junta Tuitiva; the movement was crushed and Murillo executed in January 1810, but his phrase —'the torch I leave burning, no one will be able to put out'— consecrated him as a martyr and national hero.
The war was long and ferocious, and it lasted fifteen years. In the valleys and mountains arose the so-called 'republiquetas', pockets of rural guerrilla warfare that resisted the royalist army with peasant and Indigenous support. Among their leaders were Ignacio Warnes in Santa Cruz, Manuel Ascensio Padilla and, above all, Juana Azurduy de Padilla, the heroine who fought at the head of her troops and who is today a symbol of the independence struggle and of Bolivian women. Cochabamba too had its feat with the Heroines of La Coronilla (1812), and Tarija with the battle of La Tablada (1817), led by Eustaquio 'Moto' Méndez.
These guerrillas, cut off from the rest of the continent by the royalist reconquest of Peru, wore down colonial power for years until continental independence changed the balance. The final defeat of the royalist troops at the battle of Tumusla, on April 1, 1825, opened the way for the creation of the new republic in the very heart of South America.
Definitive independence came with the campaign of marshal Antonio José de Sucre, lieutenant of Simón Bolívar, who after the decisive victory of Ayacucho (December 1824) liberated Upper Peru. Sucre called an assembly of representatives of the Upper Peruvian provinces which, meeting in Chuquisaca, proclaimed independence on August 6, 1825 and decided to create a State of its own, separate from both Peru and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. The new republic was named 'Bolívar' —later Bolivia— in honor of the Liberator, designated 'Father of the Republic'.
Bolívar drafted the country's first Constitution, the so-called lifetime Constitution of 1826, and Sucre took office as first president. The city of Chuquisaca was renamed Sucre in his honor and remained the capital. The young nation was born fragile, however: it inherited a mining economy ruined by the wars, a mostly Indigenous population subject to the colonial tribute and a small creole elite. Sucre governed for a short time and had to resign in 1828 after a Peruvian invasion and growing internal tensions.
Next, marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz headed a period of relative institutional organization and, between 1836 and 1839, tried to unite Bolivia and Peru in a Peru-Bolivian Confederation. The project, which threatened the regional balance, was defeated by the intervention of Chile and of Argentina and dissolved after the battle of Yungay. So began a long cycle of instability, military caudillos and coups that would mark much of the Bolivian 19th century.
The Bolivian 19th century was turbulent, marked by coups d'état, military caudillos and an economy dependent on mining. After the fall of the Confederation came governments such as that of José Ballivián —victor at the battle of Ingavi (1841), which secured the country's existence against Peruvian ambitions— and authoritarian, eccentric figures such as Mariano Melgarejo, whose government (1864-1871) squandered territory and Indigenous communal lands. Little by little, the revival of silver mining in Potosí and in the south consolidated a mining oligarchy tied to the Conservative and Liberal parties.
The harshest blow of the century came with the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Allied with Peru by a secret treaty, Bolivia confronted Chile over the tax on the nitrate works of the coast. On February 14, 1879 Chile occupied the port of Antofagasta, and on March 23, in the combat of Calama, Eduardo Avaroa died heroically defending the Topáter bridge; he became the greatest national hero, and March 23 is commemorated as Day of the Sea. Defeated, Bolivia lost its entire coastline on the Pacific Ocean and was left a landlocked country, a condition that turned the maritime claim into a permanent national cause.
At the end of the century, the tin boom displaced silver and shifted the axis of economic and political power from the south toward La Paz. The rivalry between Sucre and La Paz led to the Federal War of 1899, in which the La Paz liberals, with the support of Aymara militias led by Pablo Zárate 'Willka', prevailed. As a result, La Paz was confirmed as the seat of government, though Sucre kept the title of constitutional capital, a situation that lasts to this day.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Bolivia was one of the world's largest producers of tin, a metal key to industry and to the First World War. The economy revolved around the 'tin barons' —Simón I. Patiño, Mauricio Hochschild and Carlos Víctor Aramayo—, headed by Patiño, a man from Cochabamba of humble origins who became one of the richest men on the planet and a symbol of the power of the mining 'rosca'. Alongside that concentration of wealth lived masses of impoverished miners and Indigenous people, and socialist, indigenist and nationalist ideas were growing.
In that context, Bolivia threw itself into another catastrophic war: the Chaco War (1932-1935) against Paraguay, over control of the arid Chaco Boreal and its supposed oil reserves, a dispute in which the interests of oil companies also weighed. Bolivia mobilized close to 250,000 men and suffered a humiliating defeat: the country lost tens of thousands of lives —many soldiers were Indigenous people from the altiplano, poorly prepared for the heat and the thirst of the Chaco— and gave up most of the disputed territory. The ceasefire was signed on June 12, 1935.
The tragedy of the Chaco had a decisive consequence: it forged a new national consciousness among the veterans. The so-called 'Chaco generation' called into question the old oligarchic order and the mining 'rosca', and out of it came the movements and parties —the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), the Marxist left, military nationalism— that would transform the country. The 'socialist' military governments of David Toro and Germán Busch in the late thirties attempted the first oil nationalization (creation of YPFB, 1936-1937), anticipating the great changes that would arrive in 1952.
On April 9, 1952 a popular insurrection broke out in Bolivia that gave rise to one of the most important events in 20th-century Latin American history: the National Revolution. Headed by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), with Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo at its head and the decisive backing of the armed miners and of the unions, the revolution took power after defeating the army. The MNR was thereby claiming the electoral victory it had won in 1951 and which a military junta had refused to recognize.
The new government pushed through three transformative measures. First, universal suffrage, established by decree on July 21, 1952, which for the first time granted the vote to Indigenous people, to women and to the illiterate, multiplying the electoral roll. Second, the nationalization of the great tin mines: on October 31, 1952, at the María Barzola field in Catavi, Paz Estenssoro signed the decree that transferred the mines of Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo to the new Mining Corporation of Bolivia (COMIBOL). Third, land reform, decreed on August 2, 1953 in Ucureña, which abolished the regime of servitude in the countryside and distributed land among the peasants.
The Revolution of 1952 changed Bolivia forever: it brought the Indigenous and peasant majorities into political life, created the powerful Bolivian Workers' Center (COB) and laid the foundations of a more national State. It did not achieve lasting stability, however. The internal conflicts of the MNR, economic pressures and growing military influence —with the support of the United States at the height of the Cold War— gradually undermined the process, which ended abruptly with the military coup of 1964.
On November 4, 1964, a coup d'état headed by general René Barrientos overthrew Paz Estenssoro and opened a long cycle of military governments that stretched until 1982. Barrientos, resting on a pact with the peasants but at odds with the miners —whom he repressed harshly in episodes such as the San Juan massacre of 1967—, governed until his death in a helicopter accident in 1969. It was during his term that, in October 1967, the guerrilla fighter Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, who was trying to open a revolutionary front in Ñancahuazú, was captured and executed the following day in the schoolhouse of La Higuera, in the Bolivian southeast.
After a brief interlude of left-wing nationalist governments (Ovando, Torres), in August 1971 general Hugo Banzer took power by a coup and established one of the longest and most repressive dictatorships in the country, marked by the banning of political parties, the persecution of unions and the disappearance of opponents. The most brutal period came with the 'narcogolpe' —the cocaine coup— of Luis García Meza in July 1980, linked to drug trafficking and to repression, with hundreds murdered and disappeared, among them the socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz.
Popular pressure, economic crisis and international isolation forced the military out. In October 1982, Hernán Siles Zuazo took office as president and Bolivia recovered its democracy. But the new government inherited an economy in ruins that led to a devastating hyperinflation: between 1984 and 1985 prices multiplied hundreds of times over, one of the greatest hyperinflations in world history. The crisis was finally brought under control in August 1985 with Supreme Decree 21060 and the 'New Economic Policy' of a by then elderly Paz Estenssoro, a very harsh neoliberal adjustment that stabilized the currency but closed COMIBOL mines and drove thousands of miners out toward El Alto and the Chapare.
Between 1985 and 2000, Bolivia lived through a period of pacted democracy and of application of the neoliberal model. Governments of the MNR, of Banzer's ADN and of the MIR took turns applying privatizations, trade liberalization and the so-called 'capitalization' of state companies during the first term of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997), who also pushed reforms such as popular participation and the recognition of the multiethnic and pluricultural character of the country in the Constitution of 1994. The model, however, left out broad popular and Indigenous sectors, whose discontent kept growing.
That unease exploded in the 'Water War' of Cochabamba, between January and April 2000. The privatization of the drinking water service, granted to a consortium linked to the multinational Bechtel, caused sharp rate increases and a massive popular rebellion which, after clashes and deaths, managed to reverse the privatization. It was the first great triumph of the new cycle of social mobilization and a worldwide symbol of resistance to the commodification of natural resources.
The tension culminated in the 'Gas War' of October 2003. The plan of Sánchez de Lozada's government to export natural gas through a Chilean port set off an insurrection in El Alto and La Paz. The repression left more than sixty dead —the so-called 'October Massacre'—, and on October 17, 2003 Sánchez de Lozada resigned and fled the country. He was succeeded by Carlos Mesa, and in 2005 a new wave of protests precipitated early elections. The cycle of rebellions, led by peasant, coca-grower and Indigenous movements, had completely transformed the Bolivian political map.
In December 2005, Evo Morales Ayma, a coca-grower leader of Aymara origin born in Orinoca (Oruro), won the elections with a historic majority and, in January 2006, became the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, at the head of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). His arrival in power represented a deep shift: for the first time, a country with an Indigenous majority was governed by a leader who openly claimed that identity.
Among his first measures, the nationalization of hydrocarbons stood out, decreed on May 1, 2006 through Supreme Decree 28701, which gave the State back control of gas resources and multiplied fiscal revenue, making it possible to finance social payments and public works in a context of high international prices. In 2009, after a Constituent Assembly and a referendum, a new Constitution was promulgated on February 7 that refounded the country as the Plurinational State of Bolivia, recognized thirty-six Indigenous nations and peoples, made their languages official, established autonomies and enshrined Andean concepts such as 'living well' (suma qamaña).
For almost fourteen years, Bolivia experienced economic growth, poverty reduction and social stability, but also growing tensions over Morales's indefinite reelection. After losing a referendum in 2016 and running all the same for a fourth term, the elections of October 2019, questioned by accusations of fraud, set off a serious crisis. Amid protests and the withdrawal of the support of the Armed Forces and the police, Morales resigned in November 2019 and left for exile, first to Mexico and then to Argentina.
Evo Morales's resignation in November 2019 opened one of the most convulsive periods in the country's recent history. The opposition senator Jeanine Áñez assumed the interim presidency in much-disputed circumstances, and her transitional government was marked by strong polarization and by acts of violence such as the repressions at Sacaba and Senkata, which left dozens dead. The covid-19 pandemic hit the country and postponed the elections called to settle the crisis.
In October 2020, the vote gave a decisive victory to Luis Arce, Morales's former economy minister and considered the architect of the economic model of the previous period, who took office as president in November of that year and returned power to the MAS. His government, however, had to face a difficult economic situation —aggravated by the fall in gas production and exports— and, above all, a deep internal split between 'arcistas' and 'evistas', that is, between the followers of Arce and those of Morales, which fractured the governing party and dominated the politics of the following years.
As for resources, Bolivia is staking much of its future on the lithium of the Salar de Uyuni, which holds one of the largest reserves in the world and which the State is seeking to industrialize as the basis of a new economy. A landlocked country that keeps its maritime claim alive, plurinational in its Constitution and in its everyday life, with a geography that runs from the Andean snow peaks to the Amazon and a cultural wealth expressed in its music, its weavings and its festivals, contemporary Bolivia goes on wrestling between its enormous potential and the political and economic tensions of a national project still under construction.
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The department of Beni takes up a good part of the Bolivian Amazon, an immense plain of savannas and forests —more than two hundred thousand square kilometers, the second largest department in the country— crossed by great rivers such as the Mamoré, the Beni, the Iténez and the Yacuma, which floods every rainy season. That region, known as the Llanos de Moxos, was home to astonishing pre-Hispanic societies: from around the 4th century BC and until the 13th century, the Moxeño and Baure peoples built an enormous system of causeways, raised fields or 'elevated fields', canals, artificial lagoons and mounds in order to farm, fish and move about in waterlogged country.
This 'hydraulic culture of the mounds' is one of the greatest works of agricultural engineering in pre-Columbian America, with a cultivated area estimated at tens of thousands of square kilometers, still visible from the air in the form of geometries drawn across the savanna. Little known for a long time, these cultures reveal that the Amazon was densely populated and deeply transformed by human beings long before the European arrival, disproving the old idea of a virgin, untouched jungle.
Beni is still today one of the territories of greatest Indigenous diversity in Bolivia: on its plains live Moxeño, Movima, Cayubaba, Canichana, Itonama, Baure, Yuracaré, Chácobo and Tacana peoples, among others, who keep their languages and traditions. It was precisely in Trinidad, in 1887, that the Indigenous movement of the Guayochería broke out, headed by the Itonama leader Andrés Guayocho, one of the first great Amazonian uprisings against the abuses of the authorities and the bosses.
In the 17th century, the Jesuits founded in the Llanos de Moxos a network of missions to evangelize the Amazonian peoples, parallel and contemporary to that of Chiquitos. Between 1682 and the middle of the 18th century they raised reductions such as Loreto, Trinidad, San Ignacio, San Javier, San Pedro, Exaltación, Magdalena, San Joaquín, Baures and Santa Ana, into which they introduced cattle —the origin of the region's future ranching vocation—, new techniques and a remarkable artistic and musical life.
Out of those reductions was born the city of Trinidad —officially La Santísima Trinidad—, founded in 1686 by the Jesuit Cipriano Barace on the banks of the Mamoré river and later moved to its present site on a rise to escape the floods. Today it is the capital of the department and its main urban center, the heart of cattle ranching and the starting point for Amazon tourism.
In the Moxeño missions an exceptional tradition of sacred music and art took shape: choirs, orchestras and Indigenous workshops that preserved for centuries scores of the American baroque, revived today by ensembles such as the Ensamble Moxos. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, those communities were left in the hands of civil administrators, but they kept much of their religious and musical culture alive, and it remains the spiritual hallmark of Beni.
The greatest living cultural treasure of Beni is the Ichapekene Piesta, the great festival of San Ignacio de Moxos, considered the most perfect synthesis of the Amazonian-Jesuit blend. Held every year between the end of July and the beginning of August —with its climax on July 31, the day of Saint Ignatius of Loyola—, the festivity brings the Moxeño communities together for weeks in a display of dances, baroque music, Catholic rites and Indigenous traditions organized by the Cabildo Indigenal.
Its most emblematic figures are the macheteros, dancers who wear great headdresses of colored feathers —made with dozens of macaw feathers— and who represent the victorious warriors and the souls of the ancestors. Alongside them some fifty dances parade, the almost twenty-meter 'palo ensebado' or greased pole is celebrated, and the baroque music preserved since Jesuit times sounds out. On December 5, 2012, Unesco declared the Ichapekene Piesta Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This festival condenses the deep identity of Beni: the fusion of the Catholic spirituality brought by the missionaries with the worldview and the aesthetics of the peoples of the rainforest. Its dances, its instruments and its music are part of a tradition that makes the Moxeño people one of the most remarkable guardians of the intangible cultural heritage of the whole Amazon basin.
During the first republican stage, the vast Amazonian territory of the north remained barely integrated into the rest of the country. The department of Beni was created on November 18, 1842 by decree of marshal and president José Ballivián, shortly after his victory at the battle of Ingavi; its name comes from the Beni river, a word of Indigenous root that has been translated as 'meadows' or 'wind'. With its creation, Bolivia sought to assert its presence in an immense, remote region that was hard to reach.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the region lived through the rubber boom, extracted from the tree Hevea brasiliensis. Businessmen and 'siringuero' workers pushed deep into the jungle and put up 'barracas' and centers such as Cachuela Esperanza, on the Beni river, which came to have one of the best-equipped hospitals in Bolivia. Rubber attracted capital and filled the Amazon with new river routes, but it also subjected the Indigenous peoples to a brutal labor regime, often close to slavery, leaving a tragic mark on the whole region.
After the collapse of the rubber price, the economy of Beni turned toward extensive cattle ranching on its natural savannas, an activity inherited from the Jesuit estates. The department today holds the largest cattle stock in the country —on the order of three million head— the basis of a culture of cowboys and ranches which, together with the brazil nut harvest in the north and emerging tourism, sustains the economic life of the region.
The great tourist destination of Beni is Rurrenabaque, an Amazonian town on the banks of the Beni river, at the point where the last Andean foothills merge with the jungle. Affectionately called 'Rurre', it is the main gateway to nature tourism in northern Bolivia and an internationally known backpacker hub, a meeting point for travelers from all over the world.
From there two complementary experiences are within reach. On the one hand, the Pampas del Yacuma, a protected area of flooded savannas where it is easy to spot caimans, capybaras, pink river dolphins, monkeys, anacondas and an enormous number of birds. On the other, across the river, the tropical rainforest of Madidi National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet —though the heart of the Madidi belongs to the department of La Paz—, where deep-jungle treks are run with Indigenous guides from the local communities.
Alongside Trinidad and Rurrenabaque, cities such as Riberalta and Guayaramerín, in the far north on the border with Brazil, complete the Beni map, tied to cattle, brazil nuts and river trade. With its mighty rivers, its sunsets over the flooded savanna and its astonishing wildlife, Beni offers the most Amazonian and least known face of Bolivia, a territory where the history of the hydraulic cultures, the missions and rubber coexists with one of the greatest natural riches of the continent.
The department of Chuquisaca carries an enormous historical weight: its capital, Sucre, was during the colonial period the city of La Plata (or Charcas), seat of the Royal Audiencia of Charcas, created in 1559 by Philip II. This supreme court administered justice over a vast territory that took in part of present-day Paraguay, southeastern Peru, northern Chile, northwestern Argentina and almost all of Bolivia. Founded around 1538-1540 in a temperate valley with a mild climate, the city became the great administrative, religious and cultural center of Upper Peru.
Its Universidad Mayor Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier, founded by papal bull on March 27, 1624, was one of the most prestigious in the Americas and a seedbed of independence ideas; from it came the celebrated 'Doctores de Charcas'. The historic center of Sucre, with its whitewashed colonial architecture —hence its nickname of 'White City'—, its churches, convents and palaces, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1991.
Chuquisaca is the cradle of American independence. On May 25, 1809 the Revolution of Chuquisaca broke out there, when the judges of the Audiencia and the intellectuals of the university deposed president Ramón García de León y Pizarro. It is considered one of the first risings against colonial authority in Spanish America —the 'first libertarian cry of the Americas'—, coming before the juntas of La Paz, Quito, Caracas and Buenos Aires.
And it was also in this city that the Republic was born: on August 6, 1825, the assembly of representatives of the Upper Peruvian provinces meeting in Chuquisaca proclaimed independence and created Bolivia. The city was renamed Sucre in honor of marshal Antonio José de Sucre, its first president, and it remains the constitutional capital of Bolivia and the seat of the Judiciary, although since the end of the 19th century the government has resided in La Paz. May 25 is the departmental commemoration of Chuquisaca.
The department preserves a strong cultural identity in its valleys. In Tarabuco, some 60 km from Sucre, lives the Yampara people, famous for textiles of extraordinary quality, with an iconography of their own that tells of Andean life and worldview. These weavings are considered among the finest in Bolivia and are exhibited in specialized museums of the region.
Tarabuco is also the setting of the Pujllay, a great festival that commemorates the Indigenous victory at the battle of Jumbate (1816) during the wars of independence, with dances, music on native instruments and colorful costumes; its Sunday market is one of the most authentic in the country. The Pujllay, together with the Yampara tradition of the neighboring department, has been recognized by Unesco as part of the intangible cultural heritage, and is one of the great cultural attractions of south-central Bolivia.
A few kilometers from Sucre, the Cal Orcko site displays one of the largest sets of dinosaur footprints in the world: thousands of fossilized tracks of dozens of different species, printed on an almost vertical wall about a hundred meters high that was originally horizontal mud, later raised by the tectonic movements that formed the Andes.
These footprints, some 68 million years old, bear witness to the abundant fauna that inhabited the region at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the place was the shore of an ancient lake. The site, today turned into the Parque Cretácico, is one of the main scientific and tourist attractions of Chuquisaca and offers a unique window onto the world of South American dinosaurs, complementing the colonial heritage of the White City.
Set in the geographical heart of Bolivia, the department of Cochabamba was from pre-Hispanic times a fertile wheat- and maize-growing valley, settled by Quechua and Aymara-speaking peoples. Its temperate climate and generous soil made it a coveted granary, and for that reason the Incas incorporated it with special interest into the Collasuyo, moving populations there through the mitimaes system to secure the production of maize meant to feed the armies and the centers of the empire.
From that period comes Incallajta, in the municipality of Pocona, the largest Inca architectural complex in present-day Bolivian territory and, after Tiwanaku, one of the most important archaeological sites in the country. Its great kallanka —an enormous roofed meeting hall— and its walls bear witness to the strategic role of these valleys as the eastern frontier of the Tahuantinsuyo, facing the Guaraní peoples of the foothills.
The city of Cochabamba was founded as Villa de Oropesa on August 15, 1571, on the orders of viceroy Francisco de Toledo, with the express purpose of creating a center of agricultural production to supply food to the mines of Potosí. The Cochabamba valley fulfilled that function throughout the colonial period and earned the name of 'granary of Upper Peru', providing wheat, maize and other products to the mining cities of the altiplano.
That agricultural and market vocation forged the Cochabamba identity. The region is affectionately known as 'la Llajta' (the town, in Quechua), and its capital is recognized as the gastronomic capital of Bolivia, with an abundant and varied valley cooking. Quechua is still a living language in its markets and communities, and the spring-like climate almost all year round earned it the nickname of 'city of eternal spring'.
Cochabamba played a prominent role in the wars of independence. Its most famous episode is the feat of the Heroines of La Coronilla: on May 27, 1812, a group of Cochabamba women —many of them elderly, blind and with children— defended the city against the royalist army of general Goyeneche on the hill of San Sebastián, after the defeat of the patriot militias. Their sacrifice became a symbol of the courage of the women of the people.
In memory of that feat, in 1927 president Hernando Siles Reyes established May 27 as Mother's Day in Bolivia, a date celebrated all over the country. The hill of La Coronilla, crowned today by a monument to the heroines, is one of the most cherished places of memory in the city, and the figure of these women is a central part of the patriotic story of Cochabamba.
In recent times, Cochabamba was the setting for an event with worldwide repercussions: the 'Water War', between January and April 2000. The privatization of the municipal drinking water service, granted to a consortium linked to the multinational Bechtel, caused sharp rate increases that the population could not pay and set off a massive popular rebellion, with roadblocks, marches and clashes that left victims.
Citizen pressure managed to reverse the privatization and expel the company, an exceptional outcome that turned the Water War into an international symbol of resistance to the commodification of natural resources. That mobilization was also a key precedent for the cycle of social protests that transformed Bolivian politics in the first decade of the 21st century and that would bring popular and Indigenous movements to power.
The department combines temperate valleys, high summits and tropical rainforest. Tunari National Park embraces the city on the north, with peaks above 5,000 meters and high-altitude lakes. To the east, the Chapare region or tropics of Cochabamba drops away toward the Amazon: there lies Villa Tunari, among rivers and waterfalls, an area of intense agricultural production —including the coca leaf— and of a strong coca-growers' movement that was the political base of Evo Morales's rise.
To the south, in the valleys, towns such as Tarata keep their colonial architecture and their religious tradition. And although administratively it belongs to the north of Potosí, Torotoro National Park —with its thousands of dinosaur footprints, its Umajalanta caves, its canyons and its city of rocks— is almost always visited from Cochabamba, as are the ruins of Incallajta. All of that makes the department a great gateway to the geographical center of the country.
La Paz Department is the historic heart of the Bolivian altiplano. Beside the southern shore of Lake Titicaca flourished Tiwanaku, the great Andean civilization that preceded the Incas, whose ceremonial center —some 70 km from the city— has been a World Heritage Site since the year 2000. There stand the Gate of the Sun, the Akapana pyramid and the monoliths that bear witness to a culture that mastered stone, astronomy and the hydraulic engineering of the altiplano.
After the collapse of Tiwanaku around the year 1000-1150, the region fell under the rule of the Aymara lordships, such as the Pacajes and the lake kingdoms of Titicaca, heirs to that tradition. In the fifteenth century the Incas incorporated the altiplano into Collasuyo, imposing Quechua and their administration, although Aymara remained —and remains to this day— the predominant language of the region. That Aymara substrate, with its terraced farming, its worldview and its strong communal identity, is the deepest cultural foundation of the department.
The city of Nuestra Señora de La Paz was founded by the Spanish captain Alonso de Mendoza on 20 October 1548, on the orders of Pedro de La Gasca, to commemorate the pacification that followed the civil wars between the followers of Pizarro and those of Almagro —hence its name. First established in the Indigenous village of Laja, it was moved at once to the hollow of the Choqueyapu River, a canyon sheltered from the altiplano wind, on the site of the old Aymara settlement of Chuquiago Marka.
Its location was no accident: La Paz became a strategic stop on the silver road that linked Potosí with Lima and the Pacific coast, and prospered as a colonial center of trade, crafts and administration. Ringed by slopes that climb to 4,000 meters and watched over by the snowcapped Illimani, the city grew hemmed into its valley, with a unique urban geography that still today sets it apart from any other capital in the world.
La Paz played a leading role in independence. On 16 July 1809 one of the first revolutions in the Americas broke out there, headed by Pedro Domingo Murillo, who deposed the colonial authorities and installed a Junta Tuitiva de los Derechos del Pueblo, considered one of the first autonomous governments on the continent. The movement was crushed by royalist troops and Murillo, along with other patriots, was hanged in January 1810.
His figure and his phrase —'no one will be able to put out the torch I leave burning'— made him a martyr and a national founding father. His name is borne by the city's main square —Plaza Murillo, where the Government Palace and the Legislative Assembly stand today— and by the province where the capital sits. The 16th of July is the departmental holiday of La Paz, celebrated as one of the country's great patriotic dates.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the tin boom and the Federal War of 1899 shifted political power from Sucre to La Paz, which established itself as the seat of the Bolivian government: the executive and legislative branches sit there, although Sucre keeps the title of constitutional capital and the seat of the judiciary. With its center at some 3,600 meters above sea level, La Paz is the highest seat of government in the world, and its neighborhoods climb the slopes to heights greater still.
On the rim of the altiplano, above 4,000 meters, grew El Alto, which was part of La Paz until it became an independent city in 1985. Populated mostly by Aymara migrants from the countryside and by miners displaced after the closure of COMIBOL, El Alto is today one of the fastest-growing cities in the country and a political actor of the first order: it was the epicenter of the Gas War of 2003. The cable car that links the two cities, the most extensive urban cable system in the world, has become a symbol of this high-altitude conurbation.
The Bolivian sector of Lake Titicaca —the highest navigable lake in the world, at some 3,812 meters— belongs to La Paz Department and is one of its great treasures. On its shore stands Copacabana, a sanctuary town that houses the Virgin of Copacabana, patron saint of Bolivia, whose cult goes back to the sixteenth century and to the image carved by the Indigenous sculptor Francisco Tito Yupanqui. Facing it, out in the lake, lie the Isla del Sol and the Isla de la Luna, sacred places of Inca mythology: according to the Andean worldview, from Titicaca emerged the sun and Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, the mythical founders of the empire.
The lake is the cultural axis of the Aymara people, who keep alive their language, their terraced farming, their fishing and their traditional totora reed boats. Pre-Inca and Inca ruins survive in its waters and on its islands, and the boat crossing to the Isla del Sol is one of the experiences most sought after by travelers. Copacabana even gave its name to the famous beach in Rio de Janeiro, spread by devotees of the Bolivian sanctuary.
La Paz Department is extraordinarily varied geographically. Northeast of the city rises the Cordillera Real, with snowcapped peaks above 6,000 meters —the Illimani, the Huayna Potosí, the Illampu—, the great stage of Bolivian mountaineering, along with picturesque Sorata and the once-celebrated observatory and ski run of Chacaltaya. Near the city, the Valle de la Luna offers a lunar landscape of erosion, while Coro Coro recalls the region's copper-mining past.
To the north, the land drops precipitously from the Andes to the Amazon through the Yungas, a region of subtropical valleys, waterfalls and coca and coffee crops. There lies Madidi National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet, running from snowy summits to tropical rainforest and protecting an immense share of Andean-Amazonian wildlife. This transition from frozen puna to humid jungle makes La Paz Department a microcosm of almost every landscape in Bolivia.
Oruro Department occupies the central altiplano of Bolivia, a cold, dry plateau at some 3,700 meters above sea level, around the ancient lakes Poopó and Uru Uru. It was the ancestral territory of the Urus —one of the oldest peoples of the Andes, tied to the waters and the reed beds of the altiplano, who defined themselves as 'people of the water'— and of the Aymaras who came to dominate the region.
That inheritance is still alive in the Chipaya and Murato communities descended from the Urus, and in the strong Aymara identity of the Oruro countryside. The Oruro altiplano, of wide horizons and harsh climate, was for centuries a land of llama herders and of growers of quinoa and bitter potato, activities that still structure rural life in the department alongside mining.
The city of Oruro was founded on 1 November 1606 under the name Villa de San Felipe de Austria —in honor of King Philip III— by the magistrate Manuel de Castro y Padilla, in order to organize the working of the silver in its hills. During the colonial period it was an important silver-mining center, though it never reached the splendor of Potosí.
The great change came at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with the tin boom, when Oruro became one of the world's great mining centers and a key railway hub connecting the altiplano with the Pacific ports and with Argentina. The miners' unions carried enormous weight there, as protagonists of the Revolution of 1952, of the creation of COMIBOL and of much of Bolivia's political and union history in the twentieth century, up to the drama of the closing of the mines after the crisis of 1985.
The department's greatest symbol is the Carnival of Oruro, one of the most impressive folk events in South America. Born of the syncretism between Andean devotions —to the Pachamama and to the Tío of the mine— and Catholic faith centered on the Virgen del Socavón, patron saint of miners, the carnival brings together tens of thousands of dancers in the celebrated Diablada, which stages the struggle between good and evil, and in dozens of dances such as the morenada, the caporal and the llamerada.
In 2001 UNESCO proclaimed it a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, a distinction incorporated in 2008 into the representative list of intangible cultural heritage. Every year, on the carnival date, the great pilgrimage and the 'entrada' of folk troupes —which dance for kilometers up to the sanctuary of the Socavón— turn Oruro into the folk capital of Bolivia and draw visitors from all over the world.
To the west, on the border with Chile, the department holds the Nevado Sajama, a dormant volcano of some 6,542 meters that is the highest mountain in Bolivia. Around it stretches Sajama National Park, the oldest national park in the country —created in 1939—, which protects the highest queñua (Polylepis) woodlands in the world, hot springs, geysers and a rich altiplano fauna of vicuñas, flamingos and rheas.
It is a landscape of desolate, grandiose high moorland, neighbor to the twin Payachata volcanoes (Parinacota and Pomerape), which rise above the border line. Together with the waters of the Poopó —today threatened by drought and desiccation— and the towns of Uru and Aymara tradition, western Oruro preserves some of the most singular and fragile high-altitude ecosystems in Bolivia, with chullpares and rock paintings that recall the long human presence at these heights.
Pando is the northernmost department of Bolivia and one of the most sparsely populated, covered almost entirely by Amazon rainforest and crossed by great rivers such as the Madre de Dios, the Beni, the Orthon and the Acre. Before and after the conquest, the region was home to a range of Amazonian Indigenous peoples —Tacanas, Ese Ejjas, Cavineños, Machineris, Yaminahuas, Toromonas and Pacahuaras, among others—, many of them semi-nomadic and of late contact, or even still without contact, with national society.
For centuries it remained a remote and almost unexplored frontier, at the point where Bolivia meets Brazil and Peru, entirely removed from the centers of power of the altiplano and the valleys. Its warm, humid climate, its dense forest cover and the absence of roads kept it isolated from the rest of the country until well into the twentieth century.
Even today Pando is one of the least accessible regions of Bolivia and one of those with the greatest forest cover, with tropical woodland that is practically intact and forms part of the great South American Amazon lung. That condition of last frontier, of no-man's-land between three countries, marked from the very beginning the character and the history of a territory that was fully integrated into Bolivia only by way of conflict and the exploitation of the resources of the forest.
The modern history of Pando is inseparably tied to the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1880s onwards, explorers and 'siringuero' rubber tappers —many of them arriving from Santa Cruz and from neighboring Brazil— pushed into the northern rainforest to exploit the rubber trees, setting up 'barracas' and systems of patronage along the great rivers.
The extraction of latex, which supplied the growing world demand of the automobile and electricity industries, turned the Amazon into the stage of an economic fever as lucrative as it was violent. Indigenous peoples were subjected to a regime of forced labor, debt and abuse that decimated entire communities, in one of the darkest chapters of Bolivian Amazonian history.
That world of barracas and rivers, of rubber men grown rich and of indebted laborers, was what gave shape to the settlement of the present-day department. The dispute over control of a territory so rich in rubber, in an area of borders still poorly defined between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru, would be the spark that lit the armed conflict that would change the map of northern Bolivia forever.
The rubber boom set off a serious territorial conflict: the Acre War (1899-1903). In the rich territory of Acre, populated mostly by Brazilian settlers engaged in rubber extraction, a rebellion broke out against the Bolivian administration, led by figures such as the adventurer Luis Gálvez and, later, the Brazilian soldier José Plácido de Castro. Bolivia tried to defend the region, but the disparity of forces and the distance made control of the territory untenable.
The conflict ended with the Treaty of Petrópolis, signed on 17 November 1903 during the presidency of José Manuel Pando. Under it, Bolivia ceded to Brazil the vast and rich territory of Acre in exchange for compensation of two million pounds sterling and a Brazilian commitment to build the Madeira-Mamoré railway, intended to give Bolivian products an outlet to the Atlantic. In 1909, the Polo-Bustamante Treaty, signed under the presidency of Eliodoro Villazón, fixed the boundaries with Peru in the same region.
That territorial loss —one more in Bolivia's long history of mutilated borders— nevertheless left in Bolivian hands a portion of the northwestern Amazon that would be the germ of the future department. The resistance of the siringueros and of the Tacana people made it possible to keep enclaves such as Puerto Bahía, on the Acre River, where the capital of Pando would be born shortly afterwards.
On the site of Puerto Bahía, on the banks of the Acre River and right on the border with Brazil, the city of Cobija was founded on 9 February 1906, so named in memory of the old Bolivian Pacific port lost in the War of the Pacific, as a symbolic gesture of sovereign reaffirmation. Facing it, on the other side of the river, stands the Brazilian town of Brasileia, with which Cobija keeps up an intense movement of border trade.
Pando Department was created on 24 September 1938, during the government of President Germán Busch, which makes it the youngest in Bolivia. It bears the name of the former president, soldier and explorer José Manuel Pando, who had travelled and studied the Bolivian Amazon and who signed the Treaty of Petrópolis. With its creation, the state sought to assert its presence on the remote northern border and to give an administration of its own to a territory that had been marginal until then.
Cobija, the departmental capital, is a small tropical city of warm, humid climate, endowed with free-trade-zone status, which has turned it into an active center of border commerce. Isolated for decades from the rest of the country —only in recent times was it connected by road to La Paz—, the capital of Pando concentrates a good part of the population of a department that remains, by far, the least populated in Bolivia.
Today the economy of Pando revolves around the resources of the forest, most especially the Amazon nut or Brazil nut, of which Bolivia is one of the largest producers and exporters in the world, along with timber and rubber. The gathering of the nut, carried out by peasant and Indigenous families who go deep into the forest during the 'zafra' harvest, is the main economic activity and organizes the calendar and the life of the whole region.
The department was also the scene of one of the most tragic episodes of recent Bolivian history: the El Porvenir massacre of 11 September 2008. In the midst of the confrontation between the government of Evo Morales and the opposition prefectures of the 'media luna', a group of peasants marching towards Cobija was ambushed near the town of Porvenir, leaving at least nineteen dead, most of them peasants. The prefect at the time, Leopoldo Fernández, was prosecuted as the main person responsible and, in 2017, sentenced to fifteen years in prison; a report by Unasur described the events as a crime against humanity.
With its almost intact rainforests, its powerful rivers and its enormous biodiversity, Pando represents the most Amazonian and least known face of Bolivia. A region of tropical forest that forms part of the great South American lung, it holds protected areas and one of the greatest concentrations of Brazil nut groves on the planet, and it sums up at once the promises and the tensions of Bolivia's last frontier: those of an Andean country that is also, at its northern extreme, deeply Amazonian.
Long before silver changed its destiny, the territory of today's Potosí Department was inhabited by Andean societies of long standing. Scattered across its punas and ravines are more than three hundred archaeological sites —rock paintings such as those of Betanzos and stone-tool workshops in Nor and Sur Lípez— that bear witness to a human presence thousands of years old on one of the coldest and highest altiplanos of the continent.
After the decline of Tiwanaku, the region was organized into Aymara lordships such as the Charcas, the Qara Qara and the Lípez, peoples of llama herders and growers of bitter potato and quinoa adapted to extreme altitude. In the fifteenth century the Incas incorporated the area into Collasuyo, the southern portion of Tawantinsuyu, imposing Quechua as the administrative language. That inheritance is still alive: Quechua is today, with more than half a million speakers, the predominant mother tongue of the department, followed by Aymara and, to a lesser degree, Guaraní.
The Andean worldview still permeates life in Potosí, from the veneration of the Pachamama and of the guardian hills to the challas and offerings that miners dedicate to the 'Tío' of the mine. That Indigenous substrate, mixed with what came from Spain and from Africa with the colony, forged a culture of deep syncretism that is expressed in festivals, music and food —dishes such as kalapurka, llullucha soup or the traditional salteñas— and that sets Potosí apart within the Bolivian mosaic.
Few places changed world history as much as Potosí. In 1545, the discovery of silver in the Cerro Rico —attributed by tradition to the Indigenous man Diego Huallpa— gave rise to the Villa Imperial de Potosí, which in a short time became one of the richest and most populous cities on the planet: at the beginning of the seventeenth century it rivalled London or Paris in population and came to exceed one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Its silver financed the Spanish Empire for almost three centuries, drove global trade —from Seville to Manila and China— and gave rise to the expression 'vale un potosí' for naming something of incalculable value.
That splendor had an immense human cost. The silver was extracted with the forced labor of the mita, a system that Viceroy Francisco de Toledo institutionalized from 1572 onwards: every year, thousands of Indigenous people from a wide radius of provinces were marched to Potosí to work in the harshest conditions in the galleries of the hill and in the mills where the metal was refined with mercury brought from Huancavelica. Generations of mitayos and of African slaves died from cave-ins, silicosis and quicksilver poisoning.
That conical, perforated hill, with its thousands of mine mouths, remains the emblem of the city and is still worked today by mining cooperatives in wretched conditions. The historic center of Potosí and its Cerro Rico were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987, a recognition of that double history of baroque wealth and exploitation that defines the identity of Potosí. The department as such was constituted on 23 January 1826 by decree of Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, on the basis of the old Intendancy of Potosí.
To mint the silver of the Cerro Rico, the crown raised in Potosí one of the most important economic institutions of colonial America: the Casa de la Moneda. The first mint was ordered by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo and built between 1572 and 1574; the second —the monumental building preserved today— was designed by the architect Salvador de Villa and erected between 1759 and 1773, with more than one thousand five hundred meters of façade, five courtyards and close to two hundred rooms that make it one of the largest works of civil architecture on the continent.
From its dies came the famous 'real de a ocho' or peso fuerte, the silver coin that became the first truly global circulating money: it travelled through Europe, Africa and Asia, served as the basis of the dollar and is still regarded today as a forerunner of the modern monetary system. Above one of its arches, an enigmatic baroque mascaron with a smiling face —popularly known as the mask of Bacchus or of Diego Huallpa— greets the visitor with an expression that has been read as a satire of the greed of the conquistadors.
Today the Casa Nacional de Moneda is one of the richest museums in Bolivia, with collections of colonial painting, minting machinery, furniture and silverware that tell the rise and fall of the silver economy. Together with the city's many baroque churches —San Lorenzo de Carangas, San Francisco, La Compañía—, it forms the heart of the monumental ensemble that makes Potosí a living museum of the American mining past.
Potosí was also a protagonist of emancipation. On 10 November 1810 a patriot uprising broke out in the city, commemorated today as the departmental holiday —the Potosí 'cry for freedom'—, adding the Villa Imperial to the revolutionary cycle begun the year before in Chuquisaca and La Paz. Like all of Upper Peru, the region lived through fifteen years of war until independence was sealed at the nearby battle of Tumusla, on 1 April 1825, fought on Potosí soil.
The most painful blow of the nineteenth century came with the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Although the coastline in dispute belonged to another region, Potosí was marked forever by the figure of Eduardo Avaroa, born in San Pedro de Atacama but eternally bound to the department by the Reserve that bears his name: on 23 March 1879, at the combat of Calama, Avaroa died defending the Topáter bridge with the phrase 'Surrender, me? Let your grandmother surrender, damn it!'. His gesture made him the greatest civic hero of Bolivia and a symbol of the maritime claim. After the defeat, in 1883 the department came to have a direct border with Chile.
The south of Potosí also holds a legend of the Wild West: on 7 November 1908, the North American outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are said to have died in a shootout with the police in the mining village of San Vicente, closing there, in the middle of the altiplano, one of the most celebrated flights in the history of banditry.
The south of the department holds the most famous landscape in Bolivia: the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt desert in the world, with more than ten thousand square kilometers of white plain at some 3,660 meters above sea level, formed by the evaporation of ancient prehistoric lakes. In the rainy season, a thin layer of water turns it into a giant mirror of the sky, one of the most astonishing natural spectacles on the planet and one of the most reproduced images of South American tourism.
Beneath its crust of salt lies one of the largest lithium reserves in the world, the key metal of batteries and of the energy transition, today at the center of the country's economic strategy. The town of Uyuni is the great gateway to the salt flat and to the tours in four-wheel-drive vehicles, while Tupiza, with its reddish ravines, offers an alternative way in from the south. In the middle of the white sea, Isla Incahuasi ('house of the Inca') rises covered in centuries-old giant cacti, one of the most photographed spots on the salt flat.
To the historic mining of silver, tin and antimony are added today deposits of lead, zinc, bismuth, wolfram, lithium and gold, which keep Potosí among the country's great mining departments; its economy accounts for around six percent of national GDP. But the memory of Potosí also carries workers' tragedies of the twentieth century, such as the massacre of miners at Catavi-Siglo XX carried out by government troops on 24 June 1967, during the 'night of San Juan', one of the bloodiest episodes in the long union history of Bolivian mining.
In the far southwest, in the province of Sud Lípez, stretches the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, the most visited in the country and the grand finale of the Salar de Uyuni circuit. It bears the name of the hero fallen at Calama and occupies a desert altiplano lying between 4,000 and almost 6,000 meters, with colored lagoons such as the Laguna Colorada —an intense red from its microorganisms and home to thousands of flamingos— and the Laguna Verde, presided over by the perfect cone of the Licancabur volcano.
The landscape is completed by steaming geysers and fumaroles such as those of Sol de Mañana, hot springs, and surreal formations such as the Árbol de Piedra, sculpted by the wind in the middle of the Siloli desert. In its salt flats and bofedales live vicuñas, viscachas and the three Andean species of flamingo, in one of the most fragile and spectacular high-altitude ecosystems on the planet. In the north of the department, Torotoro National Park —although it is usually visited from Cochabamba— preserves dinosaur footprints, canyons and the caverns of Umajalanta.
On the southern border with Argentina, Villazón is one of the country's main land crossings and border trade centers, gateway for the thousands of travelers who come to see the salt flat. Between the overwhelming weight of its mining history and the extreme beauty of its high-altitude deserts, Potosí sums up like few others the two faces of Bolivia: that of the human sacrifice that sustained an empire and that of landscapes that today project it to the world.
The department of Santa Cruz, the largest in Bolivia, is the heart of the eastern lowlands, a tropical plain that opens out at the foot of the last Andean foothills. Before the conquest, the region was inhabited by Chiquitano, Guaraní (Chiriguano), Guarayo and other Amazonian and Chaco peoples, with forms of organization very different from those of the Andean world of the altiplano.
In the western valleys, on top of a hill, pre-Inca peoples spent centuries carving the enormous ceremonial rock of El Fuerte de Samaipata, a stone worked with channels, niches and animal figures that is the largest petroglyph in the world. Later used by the Incas and by the Spanish as a frontier fortress, El Fuerte was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1998 and is today one of the country's great archaeological enigmas.
The city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra was founded on February 26, 1561 by the Spanish captain Ñuflo de Chávez, first on a site further east —near present-day San José de Chiquitos— and later moved to its current location, on the banks of the Piraí river. For centuries it was a remote eastern frontier, far from the mining axis of the altiplano, given over to cattle raising, farming and the evangelization of the peoples of the plain.
The turnaround came in the 20th century, above all after the 'March to the East' driven by the 1952 Revolution and the development of agribusiness, soy, sugar cane and hydrocarbons. Today Santa Cruz de la Sierra is Bolivia's most populous city and its great economic engine, with more than a million and a half inhabitants and dizzying growth. Its people are known as 'cambas', a regional identity of strong personality, with its own accent, its music and its tropical culture.
The most singular historical legacy of Santa Cruz is the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos. Between the end of the 17th century and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the Society of Jesus founded in the Chiquitano lowlands a series of mission towns —San Javier, Concepción, San Ignacio de Velasco, San Rafael, San Miguel, Santa Ana and San José de Chiquitos— where Jesuits and indigenous people created a unique experience of art, architecture, baroque music and community organization.
Unlike the Guaraní missions of Paraguay and Argentina, which were left in ruins, many of the Chiquitano churches —built in wood and adobe by indigenous craftsmen under the direction of missionaries such as the Swiss Martin Schmid— survived, were restored and are still in use. Six of these missions were declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1990. Their extraordinary tradition of baroque music, with scores preserved for centuries, comes back to life every two years at the famous International Festival of American Renaissance and Baroque Music 'Misiones de Chiquitos'.
Santa Cruz is also a department of enormous natural wealth, at the point where the Andes, the Amazon, the Chaco and the Cerrado converge. To the west, the temperate town of Samaipata gives access to Amboró National Park, set in the 'Elbow of the Andes', one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, with giant ferns, birds and an astonishing variety of ecosystems within a short distance.
To the northeast, on the border with Brazil, Noel Kempff Mercado National Park —a Natural World Heritage Site since 2000— protects sandstone plateaus, forests and almost untouched waterfalls, a landscape that inspired tales of 'lost worlds'. And in the far southeast, on the triple border with Brazil and Paraguay, lies the Bolivian Pantanal, with the protected areas of Otuquis and San Matías, the Bolivian portion of the largest wetland in the world. That diversity makes Santa Cruz a key destination of Bolivian ecotourism.
Tarija occupies the far south of Bolivia, a region of temperate, fertile valleys that set it apart from the cold altiplano of the west and bring it closer, in climate and culture, to northwestern Argentina. Before the conquest, its valleys and its Chaco strip were peopled by groups such as the Moyos-Moyos, Churumatas, Tomatas and Chichas, and by the Chané of the foothills, over whom the Guaraníes or Chiriguanos expanded from the east, occupying a good part of the territory in colonial times. The Incas of Túpac Yupanqui reached the area around 1470-1480 but never managed to annex it fully to the Tahuantinsuyo.
That heritage survives today in the Guaraní, Weenhayek and Tapiete peoples of the Tarija Chaco, whose languages are co-official in the department. The region also preserves rock art remains, such as the paintings of Chiméo, near Villamontes, documented at the beginning of the 20th century by the Swedish explorer Erland Nordenskiöld.
But the greatest treasure of the Tarija subsoil is not human but paleontological. The Tarija basin sits on one of the most important Quaternary fossil deposits in South America: skeletons of the great Pleistocene megafauna have been found in its ravines —mastodons related to elephants, megatheriums or giant sloths of up to six meters, armored glyptodonts and the fearsome saber-toothed tiger, the Smilodon. The National Paleontological and Archaeological Museum, run by the local university since 1959 and raised to national rank in 1994, displays hundreds of these pieces, and in 2022 the city was declared capital of the paleontological site of giant mammals.
The city of Tarija —officially San Bernardo de la Frontera de Tarixa— was founded on July 4, 1574 by the Sevillian captain Luis de Fuentes y Vargas, on the orders of viceroy Francisco de Toledo, as a Spanish outpost against the Chiriguanos of the Chaco. Its setting in a temperate, well-watered valley, suited to vines and fruit trees, marked from the outset its farming vocation and its character as the southern frontier of Upper Peru.
Its mild climate, its vineyards and a population of mestizo roots with a strong Andalusian imprint gave rise to the 'chapaca' identity, one of the most singular in Bolivia. Chapaca culture finds expression in the music of coplas accompanied by the caja, the erke and the violin, in the dance circles of the grape harvest, in a very lively religiosity and in festivals such as that of San Roque —patron saint of the city, celebrated in August with the dance of the chunchos and their 'promesantes'— and the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Chaguaya.
During the colonial period and much of republican life, Tarija kept close ties with northern Argentina, from which it is separated by a border that runs across valleys and ravines. That cultural closeness to Salta and Jujuy, added to its isolation from the altiplano, made the people of Tarija warm and hospitable, proud of a rural, country way of life that still sets apart the 'Bolivian Andalusia'.
Tarija played a prominent part in the wars of independence. As early as June 25, 1810 the city had joined the May Revolution of Buenos Aires, and its militias took part in the patriot campaigns of the south. Its most famous episode is the battle of La Tablada, fought on April 14 and 15, 1817, in which the patriot forces —with the decisive participation of the Tarija guerrillas— defeated the royalist troops on the field of La Tablada, next to the city, in one of the most resounding victories of the region.
The great local hero of those struggles was Eustaquio Méndez, 'Moto Méndez', a peasant guerrilla fighter who lost a hand in combat and who led the resistance against the royalists until the definitive emancipation of Tarija in March 1825. His popular figure, that of the backwoods caudillo risen from the people, became a symbol of Tarija identity and courage, and April 15 is commemorated every year as the department's anniversary.
After independence, Tarija went through a singular dispute: because of its ties with northern Argentina, there were attempts to incorporate it into the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, and it was even declared an Argentine province. An open town meeting, however, proclaimed in 1826 its wish to belong to Bolivia, and it has been part of the country ever since. That decision, taken by its own inhabitants, is a point of pride in the chapaco account of history.
In the 20th century, the Chaco strip of the department was the setting of the most tragic of Bolivia's wars. The Chaco War (1932-1935), fought against Paraguay for control of the arid Chaco Boreal and its supposed oil reserves, had in the south of Tarija one of its most important rear areas and battlefields. Towns such as Villamontes became a bastion of the Bolivian defense, and there, in 1934-1935, one of the final battles was fought, halting the Paraguayan advance before the ceasefire of June 12, 1935.
The war left a deep mark on the region and on the whole country: Bolivia mobilized hundreds of thousands of men —many of them indigenous people from the altiplano, ill prepared for the heat and thirst of the Chaco— and suffered tens of thousands of dead, besides losing most of the disputed territory. Out of that catastrophe came the so-called 'Chaco generation', which questioned the old oligarchic order and sowed the ideas that would lead to the 1952 Revolution.
The Tarija Chaco, with its hot climate, its Guaraní and Weenhayek peoples and its hydrocarbon reserves, has been tied ever since to that memory of war. The vindication of the war veterans and the awareness of Bolivia's territorial fragility are still part of the imaginary of a region that was, literally, the first line of fire.
Tarija is, above all, the land of Bolivian wine. In the Valle de la Concepción, in the municipality of Uriondo, a few kilometers from the departmental capital, lies the country's most important wine-growing region, with vineyards that are among the highest in the world, between 1,700 and 2,400 meters above sea level. That extreme altitude —with cool nights, a wide temperature range and intense solar radiation— gives Tarija wines singular characteristics and has turned the area into a growing wine tourism destination, with wineries that receive visitors and a Wine and Singani Route.
From the Muscat of Alexandria grape, grown in these same valleys, comes singani, the distilled spirit that is Bolivia's national drink and holds a denomination of origin. Both wine and singani are at the heart of chapaca culture: they accompany the grape harvest festivals, the coplas and the everyday table, and are a source of pride and regional identity.
This winemaking tradition, inherited from the Spanish friars and settlers who planted the first vines in colonial times to supply communion wine to the churches of the south, has flourished in recent decades until placing Tarija on the world map of high-altitude wines. Alongside the fruit trees, the maize and the cattle of the valleys, the vine is today one of the pillars of the department's economy and of its brand image.
In recent decades, the department has taken on enormous economic weight thanks to its natural gas fields, the most important in Bolivia. The great megafields of southern Tarija —in the area of the Cordillera and the Chaco— hold most of the country's gas reserves, which made Tarija a key piece of the national economy, especially after the nationalization of hydrocarbons decreed on May 1, 2006.
Gas royalties transformed departmental finances and funded a major cycle of public works, though they also caused tensions over their distribution and left the region especially sensitive to the swings of the international market and to the decline in gas output of recent years. In 2022, its gross domestic product was around three billion dollars, one of the highest per capita in the country.
Today Tarija combines that energy-driven modernity with the preservation of its traditional identity. The capital, peaceful and with a springlike climate, is the starting point towards the vineyards of Uriondo and the Valle de la Concepción, the Sama Reserve with its high Andean lagoons and flamingos, the fruit-growing valleys and the oil Chaco. Between chapaca coplas, high-altitude wineries and gas fields, the southern department offers one of the most distinctive and least 'Andean' profiles in all of Bolivia.