🇧🇴 Bolivia · Valleys
Tunari National Park is a large mountain park that wraps around the city of Cochabamba to the north, protecting the slopes and summits of the Tunari range. Created to safeguard the watersheds, the woodlands and the city's natural surroundings, it offers everything from viewpoints and pine woods in its lower section to high-altitude lagoons, páramo and the imposing summit of Cerro Tunari, the highest point in the department.
Its most accessible part, on the outskirts of Cochabamba, is a recreation and walking area for city residents: woodland zones, viewpoints with panoramic views of the valley and paths for walking or cycling. Higher up and further into the park, a high-mountain world opens up, with glacial lagoons, stands of Puya Raimondi, Andean wildlife and the chance to climb Cerro Tunari (above 5,000 m).
This guide gathers the essentials of Tunari National Park: what its lower and upper zones offer, how to get there from Cochabamba, what to do, what the excursions cost and practical tips for enjoying the city's great green mountain lung.
Tunari National Park was created in 1962 (and later expanded, especially in 1991) to protect the range surrounding Cochabamba, its watersheds and its natural setting, as well as to halt erosion and safeguard the city's water supply. The Tunari summit and the range have also held meaning in the region's Andean culture, as tutelary mountains ('Apus'). The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The department of the central valleys and the granary of Bolivia: Quechua land of temperate climate, gastronomic capital of the country, cradle of the Heroines of La Coronilla and of the Water War, gateway to the Inca ruins of Incallajta and to the caves and dinosaur footprints of Torotoro.
Read the history of Cochabamba →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Tunari range dominates the northern horizon of the Cochabamba valley, rising like a curtain of mountains that separates the fertile Cochabamba basin from the higher regions and, to the north, from the descent into the tropics. Its main summit, Cerro Tunari, at a little over 5,000 meters, is the highest point in the department and a permanent visual landmark for the people of the valley.
Like other great Andean mountains, Tunari has carried symbolic weight in the region's culture. In the Andean worldview, tutelary peaks —the 'apus' or 'achachilas'— are protective entities linked to water, fertility and the life of communities. The range that wraps around Cochabamba, the source of the rivers and rains that give life to the valley, fits that conception of mountains as guardians of people's wellbeing.
From a natural standpoint, the Tunari range is essential to Cochabamba: the waters that feed the valley rise in its heights, and its slopes regulate the region's climate and water regime. That ecological and hydrological importance would, in time, be one of the underlying reasons for protecting it as a national park.
Tunari National Park was born of a very concrete emergency: flooding. Year after year, during the rainy season, the torrents coming down off the range —amplified by erosion and deforestation on the slopes— flooded the municipalities north of Cochabamba, causing recurring damage to the city and its surroundings. To curb that problem, on March 30, 1962 the government of Víctor Paz Estenssoro issued Supreme Decree No. 6045, declaring the mountain belt north of the city a national park. A year and a half later, on November 4, 1963, that protection was consolidated at the rank of law through Law No. 253, giving Tunari a firmer and more lasting legal basis.
Curiously, the park's name itself has botanical origins: in Quechua, 'Tunari' is read as 'the place where prickly pears abound' or 'a planting of nopal', in reference to the cactus (tunas or opuntias) that grew on the lower, drier slopes of the range. It's a name that evokes the original vegetation of these mountains before the pine and eucalyptus plantations, introduced later to halt erosion, changed much of the landscape you see from Cochabamba.
Over the decades, the park was significantly expanded, spreading across a vast stretch of the range —today split between the provinces of Ayopaya, Cercado, Quillacollo, Chapare and Tapacarí— to take in not just the area next to the city but also broad expanses of high mountain, glacial lagoons and páramo. In its lower section, reforestation programs were carried out and recreation areas were opened for the public, while managing the area has had to deal constantly with the challenges of a park bordering a large, expanding city: informal settlements, forest fires and pressure on its water resources.
Today Tunari National Park is both the great green lung and the mountain of Cochabamba. Its lower zone, accessible and close to the city, works as a recreation area where locals come to walk, exercise, enjoy the viewpoints over the valley and spend the day in contact with nature. It's one of the most beloved leisure spots in the region.
Its high country, by contrast, offers a high-mountain setting: the climb up Cerro Tunari, the lagoons of glacial origin, the páramo and the Andean wildlife draw hikers and mountaineers. That contrast between a lower, urban and recreational section and a rugged, mountainous upper one is one of the park's distinctive features, going from the bustle of the city to the silence of the summits in just a few kilometers.
That closeness to a city of more than a million people in its metropolitan area is, however, also the biggest threat the park faces. Research and press reports over recent decades have documented the advance of land subdivisions and informal settlements onto the protected slopes, as well as recurring forest fires in the dry season that destroy much of the vegetation cover year after year. Environmental organizations and the park's own management have pointed out that, more than sixty years after it was created, the work of control, reforestation and boundary regularization still falls short against the urban pressure of the Cochabamba metropolitan region (sometimes called 'Kanata').
Tunari National Park thus condenses the not always simple relationship between Cochabamba and its range: the mountain that supplies the water, regulates the climate, offers recreation and defines the valley's scenic identity, but which also has to be actively defended against the growth of the very city it protects. For Cochabamba, conserving it means looking after its nature, its water supply and its open-air space for future generations, all at once.
Although Tunari National Park is known above all for its range and its role in the water cycle, its natural value is rounded out by remarkable high-altitude plants and wildlife. Across its different ecological belts —from slopes with planted pine and eucalyptus woods to the puna and páramo of the summits— live species adapted to the cold, the altitude and the dryness of the Andean environment.
Its botanical jewel is the Puya Raimondi (titanka), considered the largest plant of its kind in the world: a giant bromeliad that grows slowly for decades and, at the end of its life, sends up a spectacular flower spike that can exceed ten meters in height, with thousands of flowers, before dying. The Puya Raimondi stands of Tunari are a singular natural heritage and a botanical spectacle few ecosystems on the planet can offer.
As for wildlife, the park's heights are home to Andean birds, viscachas, foxes and other animals adapted to the puna, as well as the life that gathers around the glacial lagoons. This high-altitude biodiversity, together with its function as a water reservoir, reinforces the importance of conserving Tunari not just as Cochabamba's recreational lung but as an Andean ecosystem of value in its own right, vulnerable to fire, urban encroachment and climate change.