🇧🇴 Bolivia · The East, plains and the Amazon
Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the most tropical and most driven face of Bolivia. Far from the Andean image of altiplano and mountains many people associate with the country, here everything is warm plain, lush vegetation and an easygoing, sweltering rhythm of life. It is Bolivia's biggest city and its great economic engine, a place that grew at dizzying speed and today combines skyscrapers, shopping centers and modern neighborhoods with an old quarter of low houses, colonnaded galleries and courtyards that keep the flavor of the old cruceño village.
The city is laid out in a very particular way: in concentric 'rings' numbered outward from the center, a simple guide for finding your way amid all the growth. At the heart of it all is Plaza 24 de Septiembre, with its cathedral, its sloths asleep in the trees and the comings and goings of a camba society proud of its identity: open, cheerful, fond of good food, of the heat and of a party. The Santa Cruz Carnival, the music, the cumbia and the easy smile are part of the local character.
This guide covers Santa Cruz with a practical, warm eye, but it also presents it as what it really is for the traveler: the great gateway to eastern Bolivia. From here you reach the gems of the region: the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), the archaeological site of Samaipata, Amboró National Park with its biodiversity, the dunes of Lomas de Arena and much more. Santa Cruz is a base, a rest stop and a springboard for discovering a tropical Bolivia that surprises everyone.
The story of Santa Cruz begins far from where the city stands today. It was founded in 1561 by the Spanish captain Ñuflo de Chaves, who came from Paraguay looking for a route and a foothold in the heart of the continent; the first Santa Cruz de la Sierra was raised some 200 km east of the current city, near the area of San José de Chiquitos, in a region that then formed part of the province linked to the Río de la Plata and Paraguay. Because of Indigenous pressure and the lack of water and resources, the city kept moving west until it settled, at the end of the 16th century, beside the Piraí River, on its current site at the edge of the plain. For centuries it was an isolated frontier city, far from the great Andean centers of Alto Perú, living from cattle, farming and contact with the peoples of the east. The Jesuits left an indelible mark on the region with their missions of Chiquitos and Moxos. Only in the 20th century, with the arrival of the railway, the roads, oil and the great push of agriculture, did Santa Cruz take off and turn into the most dynamic and populous city in Bolivia. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great department of the tropical east: Bolivia's economic engine, land of the cambas, home of the celebrated Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos and their baroque music, with the sacred rock of Samaipata, the forests of Amboró and Noel Kempff and the Bolivian Pantanal.
Read the history of Santa Cruz →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There is something that surprises everyone who arrives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra for the first time expecting the Bolivia of the history books: there is no altiplano here, no wool ponchos, no snow-capped mountains. There is heat, plains and jungle. And that tropical Bolivia has a history of its own, as old as the Andean one, that begins long before any Spaniard set foot in the region. The lowlands of eastern Bolivia were home to a great diversity of Indigenous peoples, very different from the cultures of the altiplano. In the region that now surrounds Santa Cruz lived peoples of the plains and the tropical forests, such as the Chané (of Arawak descent), the Chiriguanos or Guaraníes who had migrated from the east and, further north and northeast, the groups the Spanish would lump together under the name 'chiquitos'.
These peoples lived from growing cassava, maize and other tropical crops, from hunting, fishing and gathering, organized in villages scattered across the immense plain and the forests. They had languages, beliefs and ways of life proper to the Amazonian and Chaco worlds, and maintained relations of exchange and also of conflict among themselves. The eastern frontier of the Inca empire came to brush against this region, but the Andes and the lowlands were different worlds.
The arrival of the Europeans would transform this universe profoundly. The region would become a stage for expeditions, alliances and resistance and, later, the heart of one of the most remarkable mission experiments in colonial America: the Jesuit reductions of Chiquitos and Moxos, which gathered and reorganized many of these peoples around mission towns.
The city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra was founded on February 26, 1561 by the Spanish captain Ñuflo de Chaves. Chaves was a conquistador who had reached the continent via the Río de la Plata and Paraguay, and who pushed west and north in search of land, riches and a route linking the provinces of the Plata with Alto Perú. In that context of expeditions through the heart of South America, he founded the first Santa Cruz.
The detail that most surprises travelers is that this first city was not where modern Santa Cruz stands today, but considerably further east, in an area near present-day San José de Chiquitos, some 200 kilometers from the current site. The name 'de la Sierra' referred to the ranges near that first settlement. The city was born as an outpost in a remote, isolated frontier region, on the boundary between the Andean world and the lowlands.
Over the following decades the difficulties were enormous: pressure from Indigenous peoples, the distances, the lack of resources and disputes among the Spaniards themselves led the city to keep moving west. Toward the end of the 16th century, Santa Cruz settled definitively on its current site, beside the Piraí River, closer to the Andes and to the route toward Alto Perú. So the Santa Cruz we know today is the direct heir of that 1561 founding, even if it changed place.
One of the most fascinating chapters in the history of eastern Bolivia is that of the Jesuit missions, or reductions. At the end of the 17th century and through the 18th, the Society of Jesus developed in the lowlands, north and east of Santa Cruz, two great mission systems: that of Moxos (in what is now Beni) and that of Chiquitos (in what is now Santa Cruz department). The Jesuits gathered many scattered Indigenous peoples into organized mission towns, where evangelization, farming and cattle work and the teaching of arts and trades went hand in hand.
The missions of Chiquitos were especially remarkable. Churches of carved timber went up there, with painted facades and gilded altarpieces, the fruit of collaboration between European missionaries and Indigenous craftsmen. An extraordinary musical tradition also developed: the teaching of European baroque music mixed with local sensibility, giving rise to a very rich repertoire that, astonishingly, was preserved for centuries in the archives of the towns. That legacy is celebrated today at the International Baroque Music Festival of Chiquitos.
The expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish dominions, in 1767, marked the end of this stage, but it did not erase its mark. Unlike the ruins of other missions on the continent, several churches in Chiquitos survived and were restored in the 20th century. In recognition of their exceptional value, the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990. They are, along with the city itself, one of the great reasons to visit the Santa Cruz region.
For most of the colonial period and much of the 19th century, Santa Cruz de la Sierra was a relatively small, isolated frontier city. While the axis of colonial power in Alto Perú turned around Potosí and its silver, Chuquisaca (Sucre) and La Paz, in the Andean world, Santa Cruz was far away, separated by enormous distances, bad roads and the barrier of geography. It was a society turned toward cattle, tropical farming and contact with the peoples of the east.
That isolation deeply marked cruceño identity. Far from the centers of decision, the region developed a character of its own, autonomous and strongly rooted locally: that of the 'camba', the easterner, with a way of speaking, music, cooking and a way of living the heat and the abundance of the land. The city kept its layout of low houses with galleries and courtyards, adapted to the climate, and an unhurried rhythm of life, very different from that of the Andean cities.
After Bolivia's independence in 1825, Santa Cruz became part of the new republic, but for decades it remained a peripheral region relative to the Andean central power. The great change would not come until the 20th century, when the country decided to truly integrate its east with the rest of the territory, through roads, railways and the use of the region's resources. Only then would the old frontier city begin its astonishing transformation.
The transformation of Santa Cruz in the 20th century is one of the most spectacular in Bolivia. After the Chaco War (1932-1935), which left the country aware of the strategic importance of its east, and from the great reforms of mid-century onward, the Bolivian state committed to integrating and developing the region. The building of highways connecting Santa Cruz with Cochabamba and the rest of the country, and of railways linking it with Brazil and Argentina, broke centuries of isolation.
To that integration came economic momentum. The discovery and exploitation of oil and natural gas in the east, and above all the extraordinary development of agribusiness (soy, sugar cane, cattle, cotton and other crops), turned Santa Cruz department into Bolivia's great breadbasket and economic engine. The fertile plain, barely used before, became one of the country's most important productive areas.
The result was dizzying demographic and urban growth. Santa Cruz went from being a quiet frontier city of a few tens of thousands of inhabitants to becoming the most populous city in Bolivia, with more than a million and a half inhabitants (and more still counting its metropolitan area). The city organized itself into its characteristic concentric 'rings' and drew migration from all over the country. Today it combines the drive of a modern metropolis, full of business and shopping centers, with the old quarter and the camba identity that live on at its heart. From forgotten village to economic capital of the country: that is the astonishing journey of Santa Cruz in barely a century.
The Santa Cruz of today is a city that looks to the future without losing its identity. The word 'camba', used for people from Santa Cruz and, more broadly, for people from eastern Bolivia, condenses a whole way of being: open, warm, festive, easygoing, proud of its land, its climate and its customs. It is an identity born of centuries of life in the tropics, far from the Andean world, and enriched by the contribution of Indigenous peoples, criollos and, in the 20th century, migrants from all over the country and abroad.
That culture shows up in many forms. In the food, with dishes like majadito, locro, zonzo and cuñapés, and the abundance of tropical fruit. In the music and the partying, with the famous Santa Cruz Carnival, one of the most colorful in Bolivia, full of comparsas, color and joy. In the way people speak, with its own accent and expressions. And in a social life that revolves around family, the street, the plaza and meeting up as evening falls, when the heat gives you a break.
At the same time, Santa Cruz today is a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis, a business and services hub, with a population that keeps growing. That tension —and at the same time fusion— between the traditional and the modern, between the old quarter with its galleries and the rings of avenues and shopping centers, is part of its character. For the traveler, Santa Cruz is the warm gateway to eastern Bolivia: the place you set out from to discover the Missions of Chiquitos, Samaipata, Amboró and the Amazon, but also a destination with a personality of its own, where you breathe that tropical Bolivia few people expect to find.