boliviaguide 
Cochabamba does not get the international attention that La Paz or Uyuni get, and that is broadly fine with cochabambinos. The city sits in a temperate valley at 2,560 metres, has the country’s best food, the largest market in South America, a 33-metre statue of Christ visible from anywhere in the city, and the most … Read more
Coca leaves arrive at the table in La Paz within ten minutes of you sitting down. The waiter brings a small ceramic teapot, a cup, and a bag of dried green leaves; you pour, you wait, you drink. The ritual is so domestic and so unremarkable to the people serving it that travelers regularly miss … Read more
The single most useful piece of altitude advice for Bolivia is the one nobody tells you: the symptoms peak on day two, not day one. You will arrive in La Paz at 3,650 metres feeling slightly out of breath, mildly tired, and broadly fine. You will then go to bed, sleep poorly, wake up at … Read more
Sucre is the only Bolivian city that asks you to slow down. La Paz is fast and vertical; Santa Cruz is broad and tropical; Uyuni is a base camp for the Salar. Sucre is the white-washed colonial capital where you sit in a plaza for an afternoon, take a Spanish class in the morning, eat … Read more
You probably have an image of the Salar de Uyuni in your head before you read this. Maybe the one with the surface flooded after rain, perfectly mirroring the sky and any human figure standing on it. Maybe the dry-season hexagonal salt-cell pattern that runs to the horizon. Both versions are real, they happen at … Read more
The first thing to understand about La Paz is that the city is built into the wall of a canyon. The administrative centre sits at around 3,650 metres, the high suburbs of Achumani drop to 3,200, and El Alto on the rim above climbs to 4,150. You will spend your first hours in the city … Read more
In 2025 Bolivia lost more primary tropical forest than any country in the world except Brazil. The figure was 1.5 million acres, slightly less than the entire surface area of the state of Delaware, gone in a single year. The University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute, who run the global tree-loss tracking that … Read more
In 1880 a small group of British railway engineers laying track through the Bolivian Andes between Uyuni and La Paz ran out of gin. The supply ship from Hamburg had not arrived, and Bolivian customs at the time was in no rush to release it. The engineers, who liked their gin and ginger ale at … Read more
Ask a Bolivian what the national dish is and you will get a different answer in every city. La Paz says salteña. Cochabamba says silpancho. Sucre says salteña, but the spicy chicken one. People in Santa Cruz quietly point at majadito and let the highlanders argue. The real answer is that Bolivian food is not … Read more