🇧🇴 Bolivia · Altiplano and the Andean west
Few cities in the world hit you as hard at first sight as La Paz. Arriving by air, you land first on the altiplano of El Alto, a flat, extremely high plateau, and suddenly the ground opens into an immense hoyada: down there, wedged between slopes that look impossible, La Paz spreads out, with its buildings climbing the hillsides and the majestic Nevado Illimani watching over it all from behind. It's the highest seat of government on the planet, a city that breathes at almost 3,600 meters and that mixes, like few others, the Andean and the modern, the Aymara and the cosmopolitan.
La Paz is pure intensity. It's the bustle of its open-air markets, the smell of salteñas and api with buñuelo, the cholitas in pollera skirts and bowler hats, the cobbled colonial lanes like Calle Jaén, the mystery of the Witches' Market with its amulets and llama fetuses, and the surprising modernity of Mi Teleférico, the largest urban cable car network in the world, which connects the high neighborhoods with the center while delivering movie-like views. All of it at a dizzying pace, in a geography that climbs and drops without a break.
This guide covers the essentials of La Paz with a practical, warm eye: how to get around a vertical city, what to see in the historic center, how to acclimatize to the altitude and enjoy it without suffering, which markets to visit, how to ride the cable car for the best panoramas and what getaways to make toward Titicaca, Tiwanaku or the Valle de la Luna. La Paz is challenging, vibrant and profoundly unique: one of those cities that resemble no other.
The La Paz region was inhabited from remote times by Andean peoples: first within the orbit of the Tiwanaku culture, which flourished on the shores of Titicaca, and later by Aymara lordships and, finally, by the Inca empire. The Spanish city was founded on October 20, 1548 by captain Alonso de Mendoza, on the orders of the pacifier Pedro de la Gasca, under the name Nuestra Señora de La Paz, to commemorate the end of the civil wars among the conquistadors of Peru. It was sited in the valley of the Choqueyapu river, on the site of an older settlement called Chuquiago Marka (or Chuquiabo), taking advantage of a key route between the mines of Potosí and the coast. During colonial times, La Paz grew as a waypoint on the silver trade. In 1781, the city lived through the famous Indigenous siege by Túpac Katari and Bartolina Sisa, one of the great anti-colonial rebellions in the Americas. But its most glorious moment came on July 16, 1809, when the La Paz revolution broke out, considered one of the first cries for freedom in Spanish America, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo. After Bolivia's independence in 1825, La Paz gained weight until, at the end of the 19th century, it became the seat of government, leaving Sucre as the constitutional capital. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Beneath the Prado, the busiest avenue in La Paz, runs a piped-in river that once carried gold. It's the Choqueyapu, and its name says it all: the Aymara called this valley Chuquiago Marka, the 'sown field of gold', because the precious metal was panned from its sands centuries before any European dreamed of these mountains. The city that walks daily over that buried river was born, literally, on top of a deposit with a history. Long before the Spanish arrived, the Choqueyapu valley was already inhabited and worked by Andean peoples. The La Paz altiplano region was for centuries under the influence of the Tiwanaku culture, the great civilization that flourished on the shores of Lake Titicaca and whose ceremonial center, Tiwanaku, lies a few dozen kilometers away. After the decline of Tiwanaku, around the 12th century, various Aymara lordships arose in the area and dominated the altiplano.
That settlement of Chuquiago Marka (also written Chuquiabo or Chuquiago) was valued for far more than its gold: it had a milder climate than the open altiplano, it was sheltered in a hoyada and it held a key position on the routes connecting Lake Titicaca, the altiplano and the valleys.
With the expansion of the Inca empire in the 15th century, the region was incorporated into the Tawantinsuyu. The Incas reorganized the territory, moved populations (mitimaes) and made use of the area's riches and strategic position. So when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they found a densely populated territory with a long Andean history, not an empty space: the colonial city was founded on the imprint of Chuquiago Marka, a name paceños still remember with pride.
The Spanish city was born in a very particular context: that of the civil wars among the conquistadors of Peru themselves. After decades of bloody fighting between the Pizarro and Almagro factions and their heirs, the pacifier Pedro de la Gasca managed to restore order in the Crown's favor. To commemorate that return of peace, he ordered the founding of a city that would bear precisely that name.
The founding took place on October 20, 1548, when captain Alonso de Mendoza officially established the city of Nuestra Señora de La Paz. Although the founding act was first carried out in the town of Laja, it was soon moved to the Choqueyapu valley, onto the settlement of Chuquiago Marka, in search of a more sheltered site with a better climate. There the classic Spanish grid was laid out, with its main square (today's Plaza Murillo) and its church.
The location was no accident: La Paz sat on the route between the immensely rich silver mines of Potosí and the cities of the Peruvian altiplano and the Pacific coast. That position as a waypoint made the city a commercial and administrative point of growing importance during the colonial period. Civil and religious institutions rose around the square, and the population mixed Spaniards, criollos, mestizos and, above all, a large Aymara Indigenous majority that kept its language and customs alive.
Through the colonial centuries, La Paz grew in the shadow of the silver economy. As a waypoint on the trade between Potosí, the altiplano and the coast, the city gathered merchants, officials, religious orders and a growing mestizo and Indigenous population. Notable churches were built, such as San Francisco, with its characteristic mestizo baroque style, and the city gained weight within the Viceroyalty of Peru and, later, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
But beneath that prosperity beat a deep inequality and the oppression of the Indigenous population, subjected to tribute, forced labor and abuse. That tension exploded in 1781, within the great Andean rebellions (also linked to the uprising of Túpac Amaru II in Peru). The Aymara leader Túpac Katari (Julián Apaza), together with his wife and comrade in struggle Bartolina Sisa, laid siege to the city of La Paz at the head of an enormous Indigenous army.
The siege was long and dramatic: for months the city was cut off and suffered hunger and disease, in one of the most intense episodes of anti-colonial resistance in the Americas. In the end, royalist forces broke the siege and the rebellion was crushed with extreme cruelty: Túpac Katari was executed atrociously, quartered, and Bartolina Sisa was put to death as well. Before dying, according to tradition, Katari uttered a phrase that became legendary: 'I will return and I will be millions'. That rebellion was recorded as a forerunner of the struggles for independence and as a symbol of Indigenous dignity, claimed as such to this day.
The episode La Paz is proudest of is the revolution of July 16, 1809, considered one of the first cries for freedom in Spanish America. In a climate of discontent against Spanish rule, sharpened by the crisis of the Spanish monarchy after the Napoleonic invasion, a group of criollos and mestizos in La Paz rose against the colonial authorities.
The revolution deposed the royalist authorities and formed a Junta Tuitiva, a government of its own which, in its famous proclamation, denounced centuries of oppression and demanded rights for Americans. The central figure of that movement was Pedro Domingo Murillo, remembered as one of the founding fathers of emancipation. The La Paz uprising, along with that of Chuquisaca (Sucre) on May 25 of the same year, marked the beginning of the long independence process in what would become Bolivia.
The Crown's response was ferocious. Royalist forces put down the revolution and, in January 1810, executed Murillo and other leaders on the gallows, in the main square. According to tradition, Murillo uttered a phrase before dying that was engraved in history: 'the torch I leave lit, no one will be able to put out'. That prophecy came true: the independence process, though it took more than fifteen years of war, culminated in the creation of the Republic of Bolívar —today's Bolivia— in 1825. July 16 is celebrated every year as the great civic day of La Paz, with the imposing Gran Poder folk parade around those weeks.
After Bolivia's independence in 1825, La Paz was already the most populous and dynamic city in the new country, though the capital of the Republic was established in Sucre (then Chuquisaca), the traditional seat of the Audiencia of Charcas. For much of the 19th century, the two cities coexisted in a growing rivalry: La Paz, populous and commercial, in the north; Sucre, aristocratic and learned, in the south.
The tension was settled at the end of the 19th century with the so-called Federal War (1898-1899), an internal conflict that pitted the interests of La Paz against those of Sucre. The outcome consolidated La Paz as the seat of the executive and legislative branches of the state, while Sucre kept the status of constitutional capital and the seat of the judiciary. That arrangement, still in force today, explains why many call La Paz the 'seat of government' and Sucre the 'capital'.
Over the course of the 20th century, La Paz modernized and grew enormously. The railway arrived, neighborhoods expanded, avenues such as the Prado were built and the city became the country's true political center, the stage for revolutions, coups, popular mobilizations and the great events of Bolivian history, such as the National Revolution of 1952. The explosive urban expansion climbed the slopes of the hoyada and spilled onto the altiplano, where the old outskirts of El Alto would end up becoming a city of its own, today one of the most populous in Bolivia.
Today's La Paz is a vibrant, deeply mestizo metropolis, where the Andean and the modern intertwine at every step. The presence of Aymara culture is enormous and vital: you feel it in the cholitas with their pollera skirts, bowler hats and shawls, in the everyday use of the Aymara language, in the markets, in the challas and offerings to the Pachamama, in the yatiris of the Witches' Market and in the great folk parades, such as the Gran Poder, one of the most imposing religious-popular festivals on the continent.
In recent decades the city has lived through deep social and political transformations, which gave greater prominence to the country's Indigenous and working-class majorities. That process was reflected even in the architecture, with the appearance of the striking 'cholets' (palaces and buildings of neo-Andean aesthetics, above all in El Alto, the work of the architect Freddy Mamani) and in the proud assertion of Aymara identity.
One of the great symbols of contemporary La Paz is Mi Teleférico, opened from 2014 onward: the largest urban cable car network in the world, which ingeniously solved the transport problem of an impossible city with enormous elevation changes, and which physically links La Paz with El Alto. Today La Paz combines its striking geography of basin and snow peaks, its intense life of markets and streets, its rich colonial and republican history, and a modern energy that make it one of the most singular and fascinating cities in all the Americas.