🇧🇴 Bolivia · Valleys
Villa Tunari is the main tourist town of the Chapare, the warm, humid tropical region of Cochabamba where the Andes drop toward the Amazon plain. Set at the meeting of rivers and ringed by jungle, it has a tropical climate and a green, lush setting that contrasts with the valleys and altiplano of the rest of the department. It is the gateway to parks, river swimming spots and wildlife sanctuaries.
Villa Tunari's big draw is Parque Machía, a park and animal refuge run by the Inti Wara Yassi sanctuary, where rescued wild animals (monkeys, birds and others) are rehabilitated. Add to that nearby Carrasco National Park, with caves and waterfalls, the natural swimming spots on the rivers and the chance to enjoy tropical nature a short way from the city of Cochabamba.
This guide gathers the essentials of Villa Tunari: its tropical feel, the parks and sanctuaries, the river and jungle activities, how to get there from Cochabamba or Santa Cruz, where to sleep and eat and practical tips for enjoying the Chapare.
Villa Tunari grew as a town of the Chapare, a region of tropical settlement populated mostly over the 20th century by Andean migrants drawn by farming. The area has historically been tied to coca growing and to the tensions around its production, and it was a key stage for the coca growers' movement and for the political rise of Evo Morales. In recent decades, nature tourism —driven by Parque Machía and the Inti Wara Yassi sanctuary, along with Carrasco National Park— has given it a new profile. The full history 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.
Standing on the bridge over the San Mateo River, with the jungle breathing steam on both sides and the monkeys of Parque Machía shrieking in the undergrowth, it is hard to believe that barely four hours uphill people are walking the streets of Cochabamba in coats. Villa Tunari sits at the exact point where the Andes give way to the Amazon: the heart of the Chapare, the tropical region of Cochabamba where the range collapses toward the plains into a world of humid forest, powerful rivers and permanent heat. For centuries this jungle was thinly populated territory, home to Amazonian peoples and a natural frontier between the temperate valleys and the lowlands.
That changed over the 20th century, and above all from the middle of it, when the Chapare became one of Bolivia's great settlement regions. Thousands of Andean families from the altiplano and the valleys migrated into the tropics, drawn by available land and the chance to grow tropical crops. The most intense wave came after the tin crisis of 1985, when the so-called 'relocation' left tens of thousands of miners without work and many of them came down with their families to carve out a future in the jungle. This farming settlement gave rise to numerous communities and shaped the human landscape of the region, with a population that is largely migrant and strongly Quechua in origin.
Villa Tunari grew in this context as a stopping and service point on the route linking Cochabamba with the tropics and, beyond that, with the east of the country. Its position at the confluence of the Espíritu Santo and San Mateo rivers and its tropical climate made it a hub of Chapare life, around which the farming economy, coca politics and, later on, nature tourism would all be organized.
The recent history of the Chapare, and therefore of Villa Tunari, is closely tied to growing coca leaf. The plant, with deep cultural roots and traditional uses in the Andes, found very favorable conditions in the region's tropical climate, and production grew explosively through the 1970s and 1980s, fed by demand from the international drug trade. The Chapare thus became one of the country's main coca-growing areas and the stage for a low-intensity war over crop eradication.
The most tragic episode of that history happened in the town itself: on 27 June 1988, officers of UMOPAR —the anti-drug police unit trained and backed by the United States DEA, which kept a base in the Chapare— opened fire on a protest by coca-growing farmers opposed to the draft of Law 1008, which mandated eradication without compensation. Between 9 and 12 protesters died, several of them drowned or thrown from the heights as they fled toward the San Mateo River, and more than a hundred were injured. The 'Villa Tunari Massacre' is still commemorated today, and Law 1008, passed three weeks later, set the tone for two decades of conflict between the coca growers' unions and the state.
Out of those same organizations —the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba— came the most influential political figure in contemporary Bolivia: Evo Morales, a Chapare coca growers' leader who led the resistance to forced eradication and reached the presidency in 2006, the first of Indigenous origin in Bolivian history. The Chapare remained his political stronghold throughout his time in government. Beyond coca, the region's economy also rests on citrus, bananas, palm hearts, pineapple and cassava, on river fishing, and on the trade and services tied to Villa Tunari's role as the tourist hub of the tropics.
Over the past few decades Villa Tunari has developed a strong tourist calling built on its exceptional natural setting. Its tropical climate, its rivers and swimming spots and the closeness of protected areas such as Carrasco National Park made it a getaway destination, above all for people from Cochabamba looking for the heat and green of the tropics a few hours from their city.
The milestone of that turn has names attached and a moving story behind it. In 1986, Juan Carlos Antezana and Tania 'Nena' Baltazar started working with young people living in poverty in a neighborhood of El Alto, organizing ecological expeditions; out of that social and environmental activism came, in 1992, Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), whose name joins the words for 'sun', 'star' and 'moon' in Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní. In 1996, with barely five rescued monkeys and an agreement with the Villa Tunari municipality, CIWY set up Bolivia's first wildlife sanctuary at Parque Machía, dedicated to rehabilitating animals that had suffered trafficking and abuse. The park and its volunteer program have since drawn thousands of volunteers from all over the world and given Villa Tunari international standing as a conservation reference point; in 2017 the organization received official recognition from the department of Cochabamba for its 25 years of work.
Today Villa Tunari combines its identity as a Chapare town —with its migrant population, its tropical farming and its history bound up with coca— with a tourist profile centered on nature: animal sanctuaries, national parks with caverns and waterfalls, rivers to cool off in and adventure activities. It is the friendly door into the Cochabamba tropics for the traveler who wants to see the Amazonian face of the Andes.
The siting of Villa Tunari, at the confluence of the Espíritu Santo and San Mateo rivers —which join to form the Chapare River— is no accident: water has always been the axis of life in the Cochabamba tropics. This foothill band (tropical yungas), where the eastern range of the Andes breaks toward the Amazon basin, holds one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet, with humid forest, mists and an exceptional density of species.
Long before the Andean settlement of the 20th century, these jungles were inhabited by Amazonian peoples. In the tropical Cochabamba region and the areas around it lived, and still live, groups such as the Yuracaré, Yuqui and Trinitario (Mojeño), hunters, fishers and horticulturalists adapted to life in the jungle. These Indigenous peoples keep their presence in Chapare territories and communities and are a fundamental part of its cultural identity and of the forest's conservation.
The combination of that natural wealth and the ancestral presence of Amazonian peoples explains why the area ended up protected in national parks and why the Chapare is a nature destination today. Understanding Villa Tunari means recognizing this substratum that predates settlement: the living jungle and its original inhabitants.
A decisive chapter in the region's recent history was the creation, in 1991, of Carrasco National Park, a protected area of more than 600,000 hectares adjoining Villa Tunari. The park shelters an enormous band of tropical mountain and foothill forest, with an altitude gradient running from the hot lowlands to the cold summits, which translates into extraordinary biodiversity of birds, mammals, amphibians and plants.
Among its most celebrated attractions is Repechón Cave, home to oilbirds, nocturnal birds that nest in the cavern's darkness and navigate by echolocation. The park also protects waterfalls, rivers and many species, and access is with guides and in controlled sectors, to preserve the ecosystem.
Declaring the park cemented the area's conservationist calling and, together with the Inti Wara Yassi wildlife sanctuary at Parque Machía, placed Villa Tunari as a reference point for Bolivian ecotourism. So the region that had been a settlement frontier and a coca-growing zone kept adding a new layer to its history: protecting nature and responsible tourism as an engine of development.