La Paz, Uyuni & the Altiplano

The shores of Lake Titicaca were home to some of the Andes' earliest farming villages, and between about AD 500 and 1000 the city of Tiwanaku, south of the lake, became the capital of a civilisation whose influence reached into what are now Peru, Chile and Argentina. After its collapse, Aymara lordships held the plateau until the Inca absorbed it in the 15th century as part of Collasuyu, the empire's southern quarter.

The Spanish founded La Paz in 1548 on a trade route between Potosí and the coast, and in 1545 silver was discovered at Cerro Rico. Potosí grew into one of the largest cities in the world by the early 1600s, fed by the mita, a forced-labour draft that sent Indigenous men from across the Andes into the mines, where very many died. Oruro was founded on silver in 1606. In 1781 the Aymara leader Túpac Katari besieged La Paz for months before he was captured and executed, and in 1809 the city rose in one of the continent's first calls for self-government.

After independence silver declined and tin took its place: mines around Oruro and in northern Potosí made Simón Patiño one of the world's richest men, and the miners' unions became central to the 1952 revolution. A short civil war in 1899 moved the seat of government to La Paz, leaving Sucre as the constitutional capital. The loss of the Pacific coast in the War of the Pacific cut the Altiplano off from its ports; in 2018 the International Court of Justice ruled that Chile was not obliged to negotiate on Bolivia's demand for sovereign access to the sea. El Alto, a separate city since 1985, was at the centre of the 2003 gas-war protests that ended in the president's resignation, and during the 2019 political crisis eleven civilians were killed when soldiers and police broke up a blockade at the Senkata gas plant.

The Altiplano is Bolivia's Aymara and Quechua heartland. Aymara dominates La Paz department and the Titicaca shore, Quechua is more common in northern Potosí, and Spanish is spoken alongside both. The pollera skirt, shawl and bowler hat of the cholita are an everyday sight in La Paz and El Alto, where newly prosperous Aymara traders have built colourful "cholets", many-storeyed buildings with ballrooms on top.

Religious life blends Catholicism with Andean ritual. Offerings are made to Pachamama when a house is built or a business opens, the Virgin of Copacabana draws pilgrims to her basilica on the lake, and in Potosí's mines workers leave coca, alcohol and cigarettes for El Tío, the lord of the underground. At La Paz's Alasitas fair, which opens on 24 January, people buy miniature houses, cars and banknotes to be blessed by the Ekeko, a god of abundance.

Festivals set the calendar. The Carnival of Oruro, recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage, fills the city with the Diablada devil dance, the Morenada and dozens of other troupes; La Paz's Gran Poder parade, also on the UNESCO list, draws tens of thousands of dancers. In northern Potosí the tinku, a ritual combat between communities, survives around Macha. Weaving of aguayo cloth and panpipe and charango music remain living crafts.

The metropolitan area of La Paz and El Alto is the country's second-largest urban area after Santa Cruz. La Paz itself has around 750,000 people and El Alto, on the plateau rim above, more than 800,000, much of it Aymara and many of them migrants from the countryside. The richer districts lie lower down the canyon in the Zona Sur, where the air is warmer. Oruro and Potosí, each with roughly a quarter of a million people, and the small railway and tour town of Uyuni are the other urban centres.

La Paz lives on government, services and trade; El Alto's Thursday and Sunday market, the Feria 16 de Julio, is one of the largest open-air markets in South America. Mining still dominates Oruro and Potosí, much of it carried out by cooperatives of miners working old seams by hand, and the Salar de Uyuni holds one of the world's largest lithium reserves, a long-running national project. Quinoa grown on the southern Altiplano, llama herding and tourism support the countryside.

Days start early and cold, with api and pastries at street stalls, and the Mi Teleférico cable cars and minibuses fill with commuters. The main issues are the national dollar and fuel shortages, blockades that cut La Paz off from the rest of the country, and water shortages.

Highland cooking is built on potatoes, corn, quinoa and llama. Chuño and tunta, potatoes freeze-dried in the winter frosts, go into soups such as chairo, a thick highland broth of chuño, meat and vegetables. The plato paceño brings together corn on the cob, broad beans, potato and a slab of fried cheese, and the fricasé paceño is a spicy pork and hominy stew linked to La Paz. Sandwiches de chola, filled with pork, are sold by street stands in La Paz, and anticuchos, meat skewers, are grilled at night.

Around Lake Titicaca the catch is trout, served fried or grilled in Copacabana, and ispi, tiny fried lake fish. Oruro is known for charquekan, its flagship dish of dried meat, and for rostro asado, roasted lamb's head. In Potosí, kala purka is a corn soup served with a hot stone dropped into the bowl to keep it boiling. Quinoa real is grown between the Uyuni and Coipasa salt flats, and llama steaks appear on menus in Uyuni.

Api, a hot, thick drink of purple corn with cinnamon, is drunk with fried buñuelos on cold mornings. The leading beer is Paceña, named after La Paz, coca tea is offered everywhere to ease the altitude, and singani brandy comes up from the southern valleys.

La Paz fills a canyon beneath the triple peak of Illimani. The Witches' Market, the church of San Francisco, the colonial Calle Jaén with its small museums, and the view from the Killi Killi lookout are all in the centre, the Mi Teleférico cable cars give aerial views of the whole city, and the eroded clay pinnacles of the Valle de la Luna lie on the southern edge. Beyond, the Cordillera Real offers climbs on Huayna Potosí, and the old Yungas road drops from the high passes to subtropical Coroico.

Lake Titicaca's Bolivian shore is reached from the pilgrim town of Copacabana, whose Moorish-style basilica holds the Virgin of Copacabana. Boats cross to Isla del Sol, a roadless island of Inca ruins, stone terraces and walking trails, and to the smaller Isla de la Luna. The ruins of Tiwanaku, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, lie south of the lake, with the Akapana pyramid, the Kalasasaya enclosure, the Gate of the Sun and the fitted blocks of Puma Punku.

Further south, Oruro has its Carnival and the Sajama National Park, around Bolivia's highest peak, Nevado Sajama. Potosí, a UNESCO World Heritage Site beneath the cone of Cerro Rico, offers visits to cooperative mines and to the Casa de la Moneda, the colonial mint. From Uyuni, tours cross the Salar de Uyuni to Isla Incahuasi and stop at the Train Cemetery, then head south into the Eduardo Avaroa reserve for the red waters and flamingos of Laguna Colorada, the Sol de Mañana geysers, the Polques hot springs and Laguna Verde beneath the Licancabur volcano.