🇧🇴 Bolivia · Valleys
Tarija is the capital of the department of the same name, in Bolivia's far south, at about 1,900 meters of altitude. Temperate and sunny, ringed by fertile valleys, it's known as the 'Bolivian Andalusia' for its atmosphere, its winemaking tradition and the open, festive character of its people, the 'chapacos'. It's the heart of the country's main wine and singani producing region.
The city keeps a pleasant center of leafy plazas, churches and old mansions, and lives its traditions intensely: chapaco music and coplas, religious festivals such as San Roque, and of course wine culture, with historic and modern wineries in the nearby valleys. Tarija is also a gateway to unusual landscapes, from high-altitude vineyards to fossil beds.
This guide gathers the essentials of Tarija: its valley-city feel, the wine and singani route, the attractions around it, how to get there, where to sleep and eat and practical tips for enjoying one of the warmest and most hospitable corners of Bolivia.
Founded in 1574 under the name Villa de San Bernardo de la Frontera de Tarixa, the city was born as a Spanish outpost on the frontier with the Chaco peoples. As early as the 16th century the chroniclers spoke of 'graves of giants' in the valley: its famous Pleistocene megafauna fossils. In 1817 Tarija was the setting of the battle of La Tablada in the wars of independence and, after emancipation, it joined Bolivia by the will of its own inhabitants. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Beneath the streets and the vineyards of Tarija sleep the bones of giants: four-meter mastodons, giant sloths the size of an elephant and armored armadillos as big as a small car. No other valley in Bolivia holds a paleontological treasure like it, and that rarity starts to explain why this southern city, with its Andalusian climate and its sing-song accent, feels unlike any other in the country. But before the fossils and the wine there was a founding: the city of Tarija was founded on 4 July 1574 by Captain Luis de Fuentes y Vargas, on the orders of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, under the name Villa de San Bernardo de la Frontera de Tarixa. The place name 'Tarija' (or 'Tarixa') predates the Spanish founding and its exact origin is disputed; some traditions link it to an Indigenous name or to that of an early inhabitant of the region. The 'frontera' in the name refers to its role as a Spanish outpost facing the fierce Chaco peoples of the east, especially the Chiriguano.
From the start, Tarija was a valley town, in an area of mild climate and fertile soils, which made it suited to farming, livestock and, very soon, the grapevine brought by the Spanish. Its position made it a stop on the southern roads, between the mining altiplano of Potosí and the plains of the Chaco and the Río de la Plata, and a point of defense and settlement on the viceroyalty's eastern frontier.
Through the colonial period the town grew as the farming and trading center of its valley, developing an identity of its own and a mestizo culture closely tied to the land. Which jurisdiction of the viceroyalty Tarija belonged to shifted over time, an ambiguity that would have decisive consequences in the years of independence.
The Tarija valley holds one of the most remarkable fossil records in South America. Its sedimentary ground preserves abundant fossils of the megafauna that lived in the region during the Pleistocene: mastodons, megatheriums (giant sloths), glyptodonts (armored relatives of the armadillos), toxodonts — including Toxodon tarijensis, described from remains found in this valley — and the famous Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat. This wealth astonished Europeans from the very first: as early as the second half of the 16th century, the friar Reginaldo de Lizárraga wrote that in the Tarija valley there were 'graves of giants, many bones, skulls', and in 1602 the chronicler Diego Dávalos y Figueroa documented the existence of skeletons of enormous animals.
Those 'giants' were, of course, the extinct mammals of the Pleistocene. Through the 19th century the Tarija valley became a famous fossil site, visited and studied by European and American naturalists — from Alcide d'Orbigny onward — who sent specimens to museums in Paris, London and Buenos Aires. These discoveries contributed decisively to knowledge of South American prehistoric fauna and gave Tarija a place of its own in the history of world paleontology.
Today that legacy is kept and displayed at the National Paleontological and Archaeological Museum of Tarija, which brings together fossils of the local megafauna alongside archaeological pieces from the region. According to the Bolivian Paleontology Society, the valley holds around 40% of the country's Cenozoic fossils, and in 2022 Tarija was declared Bolivia's 'capital of the giant mammal fossil site'. The presence of these giants of the past is one of the distinctive traits of Tarija identity and a unique scientific draw: few cities in the world can say their vineyards grow literally over mastodon bones.
Tarija played a prominent part in the Spanish American wars of independence. On 15 April 1817 the battle of La Tablada was fought near the city, in which the patriot forces, with the local hero Eustaquio 'Moto' Méndez and other chapaco leaders taking part, defeated the royalist troops. That victory, remembered with pride by the people of Tarija, cemented the region's independence spirit and is central to its civic memory.
After emancipation, where Tarija belonged was in dispute: given its administrative history, it could join either the United Provinces (the future Argentina) or the new Bolivian state. The decision, according to historical tradition, rested largely on the will of its own inhabitants, who around 1826-1831 chose to join the newly founded Republic of Bolivia. That's why it's said that Tarija joined Bolivia by its own choice, a fact the chapacos are especially proud of.
As part of Bolivia, Tarija went on developing as the capital of its department, keeping a strong regional identity. Its wine culture, its coplas and its festive character took hold as hallmarks of the southern valleys, in a region bordering Argentina with which it keeps close cultural and commercial ties.
The grapevine reached Tarija with the Spanish in the earliest colonial years, and the crop found exceptional soil and climate in the Tarija valleys. Over time the region became Bolivia's main winemaking center, famous both for its wines and for singani, the Muscat of Alexandria grape spirit made here for centuries and recognized as the national drink with a denomination of origin.
The altitude of the Tarija vineyards — among the highest in the world — gives the grapes particular qualities and has made the region a singular case in world viticulture. Around this tradition a wine and singani route has grown, taking in historic and modern wineries across the valleys, and it has become one of the department's main tourist draws.
Beyond wine, Tarija is famous for its rich popular culture: chapaco music and coplas, traditional instruments such as the erke and the caña, the dances and the religious festivals. The biggest of all is the Fiesta Grande de San Roque, held from late August through the first half of September, with the procession of more than 1,500 'chunchos' — devotees in multicolored costumes who dance in honor of the saint who protects against epidemics — inscribed by Unesco in 2021 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. All of it makes up the cheerful, hospitable identity of the chapacos, who have made Tarija one of the best loved and most distinctive corners of Bolivia.
Few regions of Bolivia have as close a relationship between music and the farming calendar as the valleys of Tarija. Local tradition recognizes a genuine 'chapaco folk calendar', which organizes the year around three great successive instrumental cycles: the time of the erque, the time of the violin and the time of the caña, each tied to particular religious and popular festivals and to the alternation between the rainy and dry seasons. In all, scholars of chapaco culture identify at least nine distinct musical styles played across the year, each with its own occasion, its own instruments and its own character.
Among those instruments the standouts are the erke (or erque), a long horn with a deep, piercing sound; the caña, another wind instrument associated especially with the religious festivals of the 'pago' (the countryside); the camacheña, the caja (a small drum played by the singer) and the chapaco violin, with its particular tuning and style. To this world of sound add the chapaco copla: short, cheeky, improvised verses sung by country men and women to express joy, love, sorrow and pride, and which make up one of the liveliest and best loved forms of popular poetry in Bolivia, though today some folklorists warn it's a tradition at risk of being lost to the advance of commercial music.
All this musical wealth bursts out with particular force during the chapaco Carnival, one of the merriest and most colorful festivals of southern Bolivia. A central element of those celebrations is the 'Rueda Chapaca', a collective dance and round in which comparsas and neighbors dance in a circle to the rhythm of the erque and the caja during the Carnival 'entrada', in an atmosphere of mischief, comparsas and improvised coplas that goes on for several days. Along with the wine route, this musical and festive world is one of the keys to understanding why the people of Tarija call their land 'the Bolivian Andalusia': not only for the climate and the wine, but for that singing, festive, open character that defines the chapaco people.