La Paz

• 1. Introduction

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  La Paz sits in a bowl carved by the Choqueyapu River, ringed by the snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera Real, at roughly 3,650 meters above sea level. That elevation makes it the highest administrative capital city in the world. The triple-peaked Illimani looms over the city, its summits perpetually white, visible from streets and plazas across the canyon. A city born from Spanish colonial ambition, shaped by Indigenous rebellion, and now home to the largest urban cable car network on earth, La Paz is a place where altitude itself has written the terms of daily life. How did a Spanish garrison outpost on an Inca trade route become the seat of government for an entire nation? What does it mean to live and breathe at heights that would leave many visitors gasping? And what survives when a city is built, besieged, burned, and rebuilt across nearly five centuries?

• 2. Founded in Peace, Built on Conflict

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  On the 20th of October 1548, Captain Alonso de Mendoza drove the first stakes of a new Spanish settlement into the valley of Chuquiago Marka. His orders came from Pedro de la Gasca, who held authority over the former Inca lands on behalf of the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The city's full name, Nuestra Señora de La Paz, meaning Our Lady of Peace, was chosen to mark the end of a civil war among the conquistadors themselves. Gonzalo Pizarro and his fellow rebels had risen against Blasco Núñez Vela, the first viceroy of Peru, and La Paz was meant to announce that the violence was finished.

  Juan de Vargas was appointed the city's first mayor. Within a year, Juan Gutierrez Paniagua received orders to draw up an urban plan, mapping out plazas, official buildings, and a cathedral. La Plaza de los Españoles, the site he designated for government and religion, became what the city now knows as the Plaza Murillo. That name carries its own story: Pedro Domingo Murillo, who stood in that plaza on the 16th of July 1809 and declared that the Bolivian revolution was lighting a lamp no one would be able to turn off, was hanged in the same square on the 29th of January 1810. After independence, La Paz renamed the plaza after him.

  Before Murillo's execution, the city had endured a longer, harder siege. In 1781, Tupac Katari led a group of Aymara people in a blockade that lasted six months. They destroyed churches and government property across the city. Thirty years after that, a second two-month siege struck La Paz, and it was during that episode that the legend of the Ekeko, a small god of abundance, first took root. In 1898, long after independence, La Paz became the de facto seat of Bolivia's national government, a shift tied to the decline of silver mining at Potosí and the rise of tin extraction near Oruro.

• 3. The Weight of Altitude

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  El Alto International Airport, coded LPB, sits at 4,061 meters above sea level, making it the highest international airport in the world and the fifth highest commercial airport on earth. Its runway stretches 4,000 meters to compensate for the thin air that robs aircraft of lift. The airport supplies oxygen to passengers who arrive suffering from altitude sickness, a service that speaks directly to the physical reality of life in La Paz.

  The city's climate follows altitude with unusual precision. The central districts, around 3,600 meters up, have a subtropical highland climate with rainy summers and dry winters. The higher neighborhoods, above 4,000 meters, edge toward tundra conditions, with average temperatures the source compares to Bergen in Norway and Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands, despite La Paz lying only 16 degrees from the equator. January is the wettest month in the southern part of the city, with an average of 114 millimeters of rainfall; July is the driest, with just 8 millimeters. Heavy summer rainfall regularly triggers destructive mudslides.

  Social geography in La Paz follows the terrain in a way that inverts the pattern seen in many cities. Wealthier residents live in the lower, warmer, central areas southwest of the main boulevard known as the Prado. Middle-class residents occupy high-rise apartments near the center. Lower-income residents build in the surrounding hills, at the coldest and most exposed elevations. The satellite city of El Alto, spread across the Altiplano plateau at around 4,100 meters, grew from working-class migration and now anchors the metropolitan area's second major urban mass.

  An earthquake rated at 8.2 struck 200 miles north of La Paz in July 1994, felt across the city and causing damage in surrounding villages. In February 2002, a combined hailstorm and rainstorm flooded parts of the city and killed more than 50 people.

• 4. A City of Water and Ice

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  La Paz draws its drinking water from three systems: El Alto, Achachicala, and Pampahasi. All three are fed by glaciers and rivers in the Cordillera mountain range. Between 20 and 28 percent of the city's water supply comes directly from glacier melt; the remainder arrives from rainfall and snowmelt. The Chacaltaya glacier, a small ice field near El Alto, vanished entirely in 2008.

  The Zongo Glacier, on the slopes of Huayna Potosi, has been retreating at a rate of about 18 meters per year. The Tuni and Condoriri glaciers lost 39 percent of their area between 1983 and 2006. A study by the Stockholm Environment Institute identified the El Alto water system as the least resilient of the three against climate change. As glaciers shrink, they initially increase water availability during dry seasons by releasing stored ice, but the long-term trajectory points toward a substantial drop in dry-season runoff once the ice is gone. New sources further north in the Cordillera, at sites called Khara Kota and Taypicacha, exist but are expensive to develop and are themselves subject to glacier retreat.

• 5. The Cable That Changed the City

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  On the 30th of May 2014, the first line of Mi Teleférico began carrying passengers between La Paz and El Alto. The Austrian company Doppelmayr built the initial three lines. Once those first three were complete, the system became the longest urban cable car network in the world. By the 9th of March 2019, the Silver Line opened, closing a circuit the system calls the Metropolitan Integration Network and bringing the total in operation to ten lines.

  The system was designed to answer a specific problem: the two cities, La Paz in its canyon and El Alto on the plateau 4,100 meters above sea level, were connected by roads choked with traffic, noise, and pollution, with high costs in time and money for anyone making the crossing. Mi Teleférico reduced that burden. It can move up to 17,000 passengers per hour across 17 hours of daily service. The standard fare is 3 bolivianos per person, roughly USD 0.43; a transfer to a second line costs 2 bolivianos. Children, university students, and senior citizens pay reduced fares. Bicycles are permitted on board for an additional charge, with restrictions on the Green and Yellow Lines on weekends.

  The PumaKatari bus service launched on the 24th of February 2014, a few months before the cable cars, designed as a ground-level complement to the aerial network. By December 2014, it had carried 6.2 million passengers since its inauguration. Together with the micros and minibuses that 57.1 percent of La Paz residents rely on, these systems serve a city where 81.9 percent of people depend on public transport to move around. La Paz Bus Station itself, the main inter-city terminal, was designed by the French architect Gustave Eiffel.

• 6. Living Culture, Ancient and Present

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  The Gran Poder procession fills the streets of La Paz once a year on Trinity Sunday, meaning the date shifts each year but typically falls between late May and early June. Over 30,000 dancers take part, wearing handmade costumes and performing dances that draw from both Aymara tradition and Catholic observance. UNESCO declared it Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019. The fair known as Alasitas, which opens every the 24th of January and lasts a month, received the same UNESCO recognition in 2017. Its central figure is the Ekeko, described as a small god of abundance whose Aymara name means dwarf.

  Jaén Street, whose colonial-era design has been preserved intact, houses ten separate museums. The Palacio Quemado, which translates as the Burnt Palace, has its name because it has caught fire multiple times. It has been rebuilt repeatedly, but the name has never changed. The Witches' Market, known as the Mercado de Brujas, sells herbs, remedies, and materials used in Aymara ritual practice.

  The textile tradition of La Paz reaches back to the Inca period and earlier. Paceño textiles are defined by geometric designs called tocapus and by technical precision. The poncho, pre-Hispanic in origin, was known under its original name unku and was built to withstand the cold of the Altiplano. The aguayo, a woven textile of pre-Columbian origin, carries meaning in its threads: colors, weaves, and figures record the experiences and identities of the communities that produce it. The Estadio Hernando Siles, inaugurated in 1930 by President Hernando Siles Reyes and located in the Miraflores district at 3,577 meters above sea level, holds 41,000 spectators and serves as the home ground for both the Bolivian national football team and the city's top clubs.