Bolivia

Long haul from Dallas to Bolivia's Santa Cruz de la Sierra, via Sao Paulo. The alternative is to arrive at La Paz, but that means arriving after midnight and leaving before dawn. Life's too short.

How's this for our Visit Bolivia billboard? Probably not your first choice, but it's an honest snapshop of the airport perimeter. Flat? We're a long way from the Amazon, but we're still within its basin. And you thought PDF meant Portable Document Format.

Think agribusiness, like the Brazilian Amazon.

Along with oil and gas, agribusiness has made Santa Cruz de la Sierra (locally, just Santa Cruz) into Bolivia's biggest city, a boomtown of around two million people. Here's my taxi view of Avenue San Martin, in the thriving district of Equipetrol.

A sidewalk during my only rainy day in Bolivia.

Not what you expect? Me neither.

View from a hotel window. There's an exciting contrast between the city and the endless forest. Also, that ring road (named simply Cuarto Anillo, or fourth ring) is the outermost of the four surrounding the old Spanish-colonial grid. The picture suggests that the city fits within this fourth ring, but the city in fact sprawls well beyond it on every side except this, the west side, where it's hemmed in by the Pirai River, which flows into the Yapacani, which flows into the Grande, which flows into--we'll skip a few--the Amazon. We're about 1,500 airline miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Pretty damned flat.

Arguably, Santa Cruz is remote, but shoppers can (almost) get their heart's desires at the Ventura Mall. (It's the low, distant, gray building next to the ring road in the previous picture.)

With money, they can also (almost) do whatever they want, including playing tennis under lights and a roof, still in Equipetrol. I have to warn you: we're in the lowland tropics, so even at night it's muggy. You go ahead: play, sweat, live it up. It's good for you. I'll watch.

Equipetrol has an underlayer of housing from the 1960s. It's being replaced, but here's a survivor.

A neighbor is already gone.

Somebody has plans.

Somebody else's plans have been executed.

It's about two miles from the fourth ring down to the colonial plaza, laid out before 1600. Pizarro had arrived in Peru only 70 years earlier, more or less, and Santa Cruz is 500 miles from the Pacific Coast. The Spaniards didn't dally.

The plaza-fronting cathedral, alas, is a 19th century replacement.

Impressive, maybe.

The best bit, for my money, is the woodwork.

Plus, of course, the view of the plaza from the church tower. Plazas exist in every town I visited. Thank the Laws of the Indies (1573). Or blame them, if cookie-cutter urbanism bores you.

The street layout of the core is over 400 years old, but few if any of the buildings are anywhere near that old. Here's one plaza-fronting building that tries to maintain its character. Thank the tenant, the Goethe Institute. (Yes, there's a German-language school in Santa Cruz. The Germans do that sort of thing in lots of places. Americans don't have to.)

The Institute's neighbor has thrown in the towel.

On the other side of the plaza, two theaters presumably replaced courtyard buildings early in the 20th century.

Still on the plaza but facing the cathedral, this is the city hall. Every time I see a building like this, I wish I had the local monopoly on architectural columns.

But here's something really nice. At the corner of Calle Arenales and Calle 24 Septiembre, it's just a block north of the plaza and hints at what the city was like during most of its sleepy existence. (Sleepy, you bet: in 1900, 300 years after the city's founding, it still had only 10,000 people.)

Architect? I doubt it. Craftsman? Sure, I bet indigenous.

The old stuff has been under attack by architect-designed buildings for over a century. (The cathedral architect was French. I have no idea who designed the Ortiz building, here in the background.)

The craftsman-colonial stuff survives here and there, for example behind the Church of La Merced, two blocks west of the plaza.

You can imagine it once stretching down to the corner.

There seems to have been a bit of pushback, somebody arguing in favor of tradition.

For the owner of this building, the word "colonial" didn't trigger fury and contempt.

Still, the old stuff has generally gotten out of the way, while the owner waits for the moment to sell or build.

It's still that rainy morning, and we're heading north 500 miles to Riberalta, a town of 100,000 people near the northern tip of the country.

I suggest that any nation's biggest political subdivisions are usually sparsely settled. Let's test this. Bolivia is divided into "departments." The two biggest are Santa Cruz and Beni. (Riberalta is near Beni's northern tip.) Texas has a density of about 100 people per square mile. The Department of Santa Cruz (despite the city of Santa Cruz) has about 20. Beni has about five.

Landing in Riberalta. The town was established just before 1900. That was a lifetime after Bolivia broke its colonial chains in 1825, but Riberalta's founders, proud as they presumably were of Bolivia's political independence, still couldn't think of anything better than a nice Law of the Indies grid. Makes me think of the Terminator. You know? Relentless.

The town is perched at the confluence of the Beni River, in the foreground, and the Madre de Dios. Relax: no squares here. The Beni starts about 400 miles to the southwest, near La Paz. The Madre de Dios also starts about 400 miles away but at Cusco, nearer to west by southwest.

Here's the layout.

There's a lot of river traffic. Can I call it artisanal? OK, I'll calm down and call it informal.

It wasn't always so. Just before 1900 there was a rush to collect the sap of the Hevea brasiliensis tree. On the Madre de Dios this involved Carlos Fitzcarrald, immortalized (more or less) by Werner Herzog, but on the Beni the big man was Nicolas Suarez Callau (1851-1940), the "Rockefeller of the Rubber Trade."

Suarez ran an empire that could have provided material for another Heart of Darkness, but on the ground today he seems to be respected. Maybe he's just ignored. At any rate, there seems to be no local equivalent of "Rhodes Must Go."

Here's the mighty Tahuamanu, built in Germany, shipped here in parts, and sold to Suarez in 1899. It carried rubber, but it also had a long history of supporting various military actions. Bolivia has had several, and they're remembered with monuments on top of monuments.

A bit of the ship's steam engine: Cochran of Annan, Scotland.

Only a couple of blocks from the Tahuamanu, a newish church borders the town's plaza. I was surprised that it was closed Sunday morning, but it opened for an evening service. Sensible, no?

Night time drew out the teenagers, too, roaring around the plaza on motorcycles.

The ratio of two- to four-wheelers must be ten to one.

Sculptors with a sense of humor have noticed.

But here's a surprise. Shaded sidewalks and a planted median.

Benches, too. People consistently choose to sit on benches in the shade. They don't call us Homo sapiens for nothing.

I sat down a lot partly because forest fires had made the town seriously smoky.

Still, I reconnoitered. It took me a while to realize that hollow brick is ubiquitous in Bolivia.

Here, somebody has graduated to concrete (or is it merely disguised brick?).

"A banker," I was told.

Most of the world's crop of Brazil nuts is processed here. Sorry: closed on Sunday.

Gotta stash the loot somewhere.

You can spend some of it at the town's market.

Blame Sunday.

But here's an honest-to-God hardware store of the kind that hardly exists in the U.S. anymore.

Two more surprises. We're on the bluff overlooking the Beni. Behind us is...

...the town cemetery, distinguished by its...

...Japanese community.

And here's the other surprise: the oddest house I saw on the whole trip.

It's the Casa Vargas, with a bit of this and a bit of that. Wish I knew more about it. Somebody was said to live in it. Alone.

Smoke kept airplanes away, so the only way out of town was by road. I hired a taxi to take me 300 miles to Rurrenabaque. That's when I learned that there's an acute fuel shortage in Bolivia.

Gasoline is tight, but diesel is worse because Bolivia produces none and can't afford to import as much as it needs.

Upside: there wasn't a lot of traffic on the fine toll road running from Riberalta to Rurrenabaque. It's a seven-hour drive.

Fire had burned everything close to the ground but not the trees.

I could have taken similar pictures most of the way.

Smoke wafted across the road.

Ever seen a sign like this?

Or like this?

Capybaras (zoomed). The taxi driver looked at them the way I look at seagulls.

Here at Rurrenabaque, the Beni emerges from the Andes. La Paz is about 150 airline miles in the background. Google calls it 575 miles by road. It says to plan on sixteen hours. Gulp. The bridge opened in 2018 and was built by a Chinese oil company (Sinopec). Controversial? Yes indeed, because Rurrenabaque depends heavily on ecotourism.

That might not be evident at first.

The local market.

Mystery jars.

But here's a signpost along a path into the river's gorge.

Here are some of the boats that take visitors away from paved roads.

Sharp eyes? You can see one of those boats. If you had been there, you would have heard it, too.

Think the clientele is local?

What about now?

The guy in charge said he had lived for years in Houston.

A coffee shop with as many flavors as Starbucks but better coffee and lots friendlier.

Like most of the ecotourists in town, I didn't want to spend 16 hours driving to or from La Paz, not when the flying time is half an hour. I have a theory about why it's so quick. La Paz's airport is 13,325 feet above sea level. Therefore, the initial descent is also the final approach. Think of the minutes saved! (The air-quality index in Rurrenabaque was about 200 instead of over 300 at Riberalta.)

Ah! Here we are, about to land at El Alto, the name of a town as well as of La Paz's airport. It's dead flat up here but more than two miles higher than the flats we crossed when driving from Riberalta to Rurranabaque. Damn! I can see blue.

There's almost infinite room to grow up here, which is why El Alto now has more people than La Paz.

Alas, the planners are still pretty much caught in the grid mentality, so traffic congestion is bad.

Yes, there are railroads up here. Many are defunct, but tracks do run down to the Pacific Coast.

Like this. Notice that Santa Cruz is linked to Brazil and Argentina but not to Bolivia's other cities. (https://www.openrailwaymap.org/)

But here's the fun. A bit over a mile from the airport runway, El Alto's plateau drops off into a canyon fit for Dante. The taxi heads down.

A bit further.

Looking back up.

Ready-made movie set.

Several switchbacks lie ahead, but there's La Paz in its canyon. Damnedest place to build a city. No wonder its population is declining while El Alto grows.

Begin at the main plaza.

,

It's the Plaza Murillo, named for Pedro Murillo. He had an excellent house a short walk from here but decided to fight for independence. The Spanish hanged him for his trouble. That was in 1810. Simón Bolívar had better luck 15 years later. On this square, by the way, the body of Bolivia's President Gualberto Villaroel was hung on a lamppost in 1946. That's not a typo.

Fighting, fighting, fighting: the central building in this trio facing the square is the military museum. To its right is the city's leading hotel, the Gran Hotel Paris. That's according to my 1928 South American Handbook. But tell me: what was it about France? Everybody in South America in 1900 wanted to be or at least look French.

Also facing the square, this is the home of the national legislature. The clock and cupola are 20th century improvements. The tower in the background needs a name. How about Louis? I choose it because the building looks like a thug hired to protect the legislators.

On another side of the plaza, the cathedral is a replacement, opened in 1925 after nearly a century of construction. The towers were added in 1989.

Practice is supposed to make perfect.

The most interesting detail is the massive wedge of a foundation. I didn't say the most elegant.

A few blocks away there's an older church, the Church of San Francisco, rebuilt about 1750.

Close-up of the so-called mestizo-styled entrance.

I had to look inside.

Thank goodness there was lots of gold. I was getting depressed, and gold always cheers me up.

Here's the best of the lot in my book. It's the Santo Domingo Church. I'm a sucker for that mestizo style. For more on this subject, someday see the files on Arequipa and Pomata, in Peru.

Too bad the mestizo orament is only on the outside.

Next to the cathedral and kitty-corner to the plaza, here's something more graceful. It's the Palacio Diez de Medina, built in 1775. Since 1964 it's been the National Museum of Art. (See José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Monumentos de Bolivia, 2002.)

The Diez de la Medina family was prominent into the 20th century, with Eduardo Diez de la Medina serving as Bolivia's Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 1920s and '30s. He was sacked for offering immigration visas to European Jews. How's that for a wedge issue?

Peekaboo! Behold the Casa Grande del Pueblo, Bolivia's high-rise presidential palace, inaugurated in 2018. Along with offices, it includes a private apartment of a thousand square meters. The presidential defense was that it was high time to be rid of Spanish domination in all its forms, including architectural tradition. Louis has a friend now. How about calling it Luca?

Another aristocrat's house, in this case of the Marques de Villaverde. Built in 1790, in the 1960s it became the National Museum of Ethnography.

Once attached to a seminary, this gate is now at the entrance to the Mirador del Monticulo park.

One more example of the colonial high life. This is the Plaza Riosinho. It's about 500 meters from the Plaza Murillo, but you can't get here from there, at least not in a straight line.

Peaceful place, much quieter than the Plaza Murillo. The men are holding a once popular means of communication known as a newspaper.

But we're here for this, the nearby Calle Jaén, otherwise a little hard to find. It's named for Apolinor Jaén, who, like Pedro Murillo, fought against the Spaniards and was executed in 1810. (It does make an American wonder if Patrick Henry, with those fine words of his, ever thought that he might get death.)

In the midst of the endlessly gridded streets of every Bolivian city, this lane is a treat.

It gets pretty crowded during the day, because, as the pavement suggests, it's been rejuvenated for visitors.

We'll look at only one of several museums here.

Turns out that Pedro Murillo lived very comfortably until he began making trouble.

He had a lot of fancy furniture.

Here he holds the torch of freedom, which, as he said at his execution, would not be extinguished.

Here he is about to die in the plaza now named for him.

I'm heading downhill from the historic to the commercial center. It's not a long walk, but watch your step. You just have to get used to hills.

Here's an obelisk, drawing attention to...

...an Unknown Soldier killed in the Chaco War with Paraguay. Never heard of it? Never heard of the Chaco? Barely heard of Paraguay? Join the crowd, but the sculpture is evocative and unusual for not celebrating Bolivia's wars.

I'm only here because the obelisk is a landmark on the avenue named for Mariscal ("Marshal") Santa Cruz, who briefly unified Bolivia and Peru in the 1830s before decamping and eventually retiring to Versailles.

Speaking of French culture, here's the La Paz municipal theater, from 1845.

Like all French wannebes, La Paz built a grand avenue. It's called the Prado and offers a landscaped median running through the Av. 16 de Julio, an extension of Mariscal Santa Cruz Avenue. Please keep up: July 16th is the date in 1809 of the uprising that led the following year to the executions of Jaén and Murillo.

The Prado is a welcome bit of public greenery. I'm not sure the Motherland Fountain helps, but many Americans love to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The fountain is the same kind of thing, isn't it?

The patriotic drum gets a lot of beating. Here's Mariscal or Marshal Sucre, erected in 1926 to mark a century of independence. Sucre also gave his name to the city of Sucre, the legal if not the functional capital of Bolivia.

You can see the French influence in many buildings along the street.

Many of the buildings are pretty worn.

You could spend a lot of time digging into this neighborhood. Consider the corner where Av. Mariscal Santa Cruz faces the San Francisco Church. See the dark shadow near the right edge?

It's the home of the society for veterans of the Chaco war. Presents a wall to the street, but you can walk in at the kiosk.

The passage leads to a courtyard with impromptu additions and another passage.

You can keep going.

We're like neutrinos flying through the earth. Why don't movies use this for chase scenes? No need to rely on Morocco all the time.

High rises invaded the neighborhood after about 1950. Given the city's topographic imprisonment and its wish to grow, they were inevitable.

See what I mean? The Prado ends behind me, at a circle called the Plaza del Estudiante.

Here's the view in the opposite direction. What do you think of the Coca-Cola sign? If it's removed, I predict that people will miss it. I mean, I miss the Southern Pacific railroad sign (just the huge letters SP) that used to welcome visitors entering San Francisco on the Bay Bridge.

People with money had already begun moving a couple of miles south, but the high rises followed them.

Example No. 2.

Example No. 3.

Example No. 4.

Eventually the residents move out, presumably handsomely compensated. Their house becomes a restaurant or boutique or is reduced to a facade.

A while back, I showed you an ornate entrance that had been moved from a seminary to a park, the Monticulo. Here's the view down from that park to the canyon axis where high rises line up along Av. Arce, a continuation of Mariscal Santa Cruz.

The same park, looking off to the southeast and snow-capped Illimani. This is the only snow I saw in Bolivia. (About 25 miles from La Paz, Illimani is 7,000 feet higher than the city.)

$\ Just a tad closer.$

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Just a tad closer.

I'm climbing back onto the level ground of El Alto.

Here's Viacha, a dozen miles south of the airport. It's a railroad center and the site of Bolivia's first cement plant. The plant's limestone quarry is there on the right. Did I say "flat"?

The plateau breaks into ridge after ridge as we descend to Cochabamba, a city of 900,000 people about 150 miles to the southeast of La Paz and about 4,000 feet below it.

Play your accordion all you want. The neighbors won't mind.

Unfortunately, they will mind here in Cochabamba's Montreal apartment building.

You'll have compensations, including at least two nearby shopping centers. I'm feeling Southern California.

Cochabamba is famous for the best food (and the biggest servings) in Bolivia. I was too tired for anything adventurous, but this was a damned good hamburger. (But the fries were disappointing. Mealie. I hate that.)

There's been a lot of money around here for a while.

One such house is now a hotel with public rooms big enough that you can feel like an old-fashioned aristocrat. It feels good.

Here to complete the illusion of California, is Bolivia's San Simeon. It's Simón Patiño's place.

You remember him (1860-1947). Very modest beginnings, but with luck and brains he became the "tin king." That may sound mocking but isn't. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers apparently says that Patiño was richer than J.P. Morgan, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. That's good enough for me.

The best thing about his house is the front yard.

Lots of privacy.

Yes, there are tours and--Lord be praised--you can take pictures.

Forget the miserable chairs. I'm guessing this was a reception room for the great man.

Now it's a concert venue.

Expensive but cheesy sculpture is the order of the day. Notice the letter at the top?

Patiño's initials are scattered shamelessly (here just under the skylight) but I don't know if that's because he demanded it or if his architect was just eager to please. (The architect was Eugène Bliault.)

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia says that "Patiño, faced with the just demands of his workers... coordinated, sponsored and ordered, together with the military government ... to silence the demands of his workers and maintain the extraction of minerals in conditions of near slavery." On the other hand, I met a man whose father had worked for Patiño and considered him a good boss. "He set up recreation clubs for his workers." Skeptical, I later met an engineering professor. I asked him for his opinon. He said that Patiño had provided scholarships so his workers' children could attend university. You sort it out. Just remember: you have to pick sides. That's the way we roll these days, right?

For a full-length biography of one miner, see June Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines, the Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner, 1992.

(For more on the architect, see https://agorha.inha.fr/ark:/54721/4b4860ca-adf2-47d4-abbb-382dafe56409)

Funny thing, Patiño never lived here. He had the house built between 1915 and 1927 and planned to retire here, but after living for years in Europe and New York he died in Buenos Aires. Think of this poor billiards table gone to waste.

Alhambra rules. (I just made them up.)

The Patiño house is about a mile and a half north of the old Spanish plaza, with another replacement cathedral, this one from 1735. Oddly, the nave flanks the plaza instead of standing perpendicular to it.

At the edge of the cathedral, and elsewhere around the plaza, the local Pepsi bottler has provided kiosks. A lonely man he, living in the shadows of the Atlanta giant.

Another face on the plaza. It belongs to Alejo Calatayud (1705-1731), a mestizo silversmith from Cochabamba. Well before Murillo and Jaén, Calatayud led a violent protest against Spanish rule and was decapitated for his trouble. Why is his name here? Ah: I have no idea, but he remains a local hero.

A block west: the church of Santo Domingo. I'm here for a reason.

Not for the interior.

But for the figures on the facade. They're Atlantes.

De Mesa and Gisbert call them angels, but the execution seems startlingly crude to me. (Monumentos de Bolivia, 4th ed., p. 225.)

Around the side there's some crude buttressing, but notice that door.

De Mesa and Gisbert call it one of the high points of rococo architecture in Bolivia. They praise the trilobed arch with scallops and the pillars rising gracefully above. I'll go along with that.

A nearby street. Talk about severe.

I'm ready to appreciate French fluff.

Behold this triumph of the lineman's art.

And what's this? It's people checking in with Boliviana de Aviación, the national carrier. You remember its predecessor, Lloyd Aereo Boliviana. That pioneer airline was set up in 1925 by German Bolivians but was then nationalized. In 2010 it collapsed. I wonder if in its heyday LAB's airport operations were any smoother than this.

Where have we landed? Yes, it's another plaza, but that doesn't tell you much. In fact it tells you nothing.

But here, facing that plaza, is a giveaway, the Casa de la Libertad. In 1825, in this old Jesuit chapel, some brave men signed Bolivia's Declaration of Independence. Is it the colors? The proportions? I really like the building.

Tranquillo.

A door that's been around a while.

The Declaration of Independence sits under glass on a plinth.

The primary signature is that of José Mariano Serrano, a judge who served as president of the assembly. Its members pledged their "irrevocable resolution to be governed by themselves."

There's a room with portraits of every Bolivian president, though all are reduced to pygmies alongside Bolívar. (Don't feel bad if you never realized that the country's named for him. I had never thought about it until I got to the country.)

The most recent office holders.

Kitty corner to the Casa de Libertad is this heap of a state government building. The national motto up top isn't quite "E pluribus unum," but as someone I know says, "it's as close as damn is to swearing." Although Bolivia's executive and legislative functions are housed in La Paz, Sucre remains the country's legal capital and houses the supreme court.

Facing the Casa de la Libertad, Antonio Sucre (1795-1830) stands at the center of the plaza. Bolívar himself was the first president but was replaced by Sucre after a few months. Sucre lasted for about three years, resigned, and was assassinated two years later. Summary: early revolutionaries are killed by the Spanish government; later leaders are killed by their fellows. Brilliant.

As in Riberalta: there's nothing quite as inviting as a bench. You just have to hunt to find one that's unoccupied.

I should mention that Sucre is one of the two Bolivian cities (the other is Potosí) that are on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Why? UNESCO explains: "The rich heritage of the Historic Centre of the Spanish city of Sucre (La Plata) is an excellent intact and well-preserved illustration of this architectural blending achieved in Latin America through the assimilation of local traditions and styles imported from Europe."

I personally didn't see much of this blending--I've seen more in other cities--but I don't object to the listing. I join the crowd of visitors who have liked Sucre. Here's Hugh de Bonelli, author of perhaps the first English-language description of the town. Sucre's "characteristic cleanliness, from the fact of all the buildings, public as well as private, being periodically whitewashed afresh... produce a very pleasing and agreeable aspect." A couple of pages later, de Bonelli writes of "the beautiful moonlight nights with which this climate is favoured. Numerous promenaders are then to be seen enjoying the society of their friends, and inhaling the refreshing breezes of the evening air" (Travels in Bolivia, 1854, p. 74-76).

The city continues to attract and please visitors. Here's a small hotel in a gussied-up courtyard home a few blocks from the plaza.

You can do a lot with one bougainvillea.

A loaf of whitewash, a jug of pantile, and thou.

Sucre is also the home of South America's oldest university, the University of Francis Xavier, a dozen years older than Harvard. The school today has 60,000 students, and they energize the whole city, population 300,000.

The students seem to support an absurd number of coffee shops. They don't, however, seem to have much use for the historic courtyard of the university. The unwelcome question is what will they do after graduation. I talked to a professor who had grown children working in Canada, France, and the Netherlands. He was happy for them and understood sadly that this was for the best. Another man told me that he hoped his children could build careers in a country offering greater opportunities than Bolivia.

Shy of jobs for professionals, Sucre leans heavily on tourists, who naturally want to see the cathedral. Like the one in Cochabamba, Sucre's cathedral flanks the plaza, rather than standing perpendicularly against it. The doors are closed, however. That way, the cathedral can be called a museum and, for at least six days a week, can charge admission.

Obviously we have to go in. Do you get chills?

Me neither, but some paintings gave me the shivers.

What is it about the Catholic faith that seems to demand suffering?

Here's a more interesting Church of Saint Francis, the oldest church we've bumped into. It opened in 1581, though the arches are a later addition, courtesy of Antonio Sucre.

For several decades in the 19th century the church was used by the military. How, precisely, I don't know.

I do like the base.

Speaking of which, here's the magnificent side wall of the Church of San Felipe de Meri. Alas, that church was closed for repairs.

The minute I walked into Saint. Francis, I knew it was special. I think it was that low arch.

I could kick myself for not taking pictures of the ceiling, especially up front, but there were strict signs, and I was compliant. (Fortunately, there is a comparable roof in Potosí. Stay tuned.)

UNESCO praises several other Sucre churches, including this one, Santo Domingo. I still don't see the "blending" of New and Old worlds.

Fortunately, the interior has lots of gold.

Another: San Lázaro. It was closed when I came by.

Hugh de Bonelli writes that the interior of this, the church of San Miguel, is "without exception, as beautiful a specimen of a place of religious worship as it is possible to conceive. It is decorated after the manner of the palace of the Alhambra... exhibiting a most elaborate design of Moresco fretted-work" (Travels in Bolivia, p. 83). Alas, closed. Reminds me of a trip I took to Pompeii about 1970. Got there: closed. Staff on strike. I never did see the place.

I did like these doors of San Miguel, but I'm perplexed about the species of animal holding those knockers.

So call me a barbarian. Anyway, I'm going to drive about 100 miles southwest to Potosí. Along the way, we'll gain about 4,000 feet. How to remember that Potosi is over 13,000 feet above sea level? Just think of the Cafe Pub 4030. It's right there on Calle Hoyos, and the number 4030 signifies the restaurant's elevation in meters. Food's pretty good, too.

One more thing: just outside Sucre, we finally escape the watershed of the Amazon. This is the Pilcomayo, which over the next thousand airline miles joins the Paraguay, which joins the Parana, which joins the Uruguay to become the River of Silver, the Rio de la Plata. Hello, Argentina.

In the 1890s, a suspension bridge was built to ease the journey. Not sure when it was superseded.

The bridge was designed by a young French engineer named Louis (later, Luis) Soux, recruited to Bolivia by an energetic Bolivian president, Aniceto Arce. Why Soux added battlements I have no idea, but the bridge was the second in Bolivia to be built with steel cables. (Soux built the first as well, for a road between Sucre and Cochabamba.) The name Chuquisaca refers to the Department of Chuquisaca, which includes Sucre.

We climb up out of the Pilcomayo valley.

Onto a plateau with yet more mountains ahead.

Yes, there's a railroad up here, or was. It's going the other way. I mean the network reaches east from the coast to Potosí to Sucre, where it stops for good.

What have we here? Why, obviously, a line of vehicles waiting for fuel. It's a saga.

And here's the Cerro Rico, a primary source of Spanish silver in the 16th and 17th centuries. The mountain is said to be riddled with workings, but I have seen no map indicating their number or character. I'm skeptical that one exists, but if you want to explore the literature in English, start with Lewis Hanke's The Imperial City of Potosí (1956).

Here's a close-up, suggesting that many hands have made a hell of a mess here. The German engineer Anton Helms visited in 1790 at the request of the Spanish government and was absolutely scornful. "All the operations at the mines of Potosí, the stamping, sifting, washing, quickening and roasting the ore are conducted in so slovenly, wasteful, and unscientific a manner" (Helms, Travels from Buenos Ayres, by Potosí, to Lima, English translation 1806, pp. 39f).

Methods in the 1500s had been cruder still. Joseph Barclay Pentland, who visited in 1825, wrote that "immediately after the discovery of the principal veins, excavations were opened upon them in a most rude and unscientific manner, not in the form of shafts and galleries, but of open excavations not unlike our modern quarry works... At one period as many as eight thousand mines are recorded to have been opened ... if such works can be called mines, they in no way resemble those of the Old World consisting in narrow, tortuous shafts and galleries carried on without any system.... This immense number has considerably diminished, many have fallen in, others have been abandoned whilst several remain inundated, without their proprietors possessing the means to clear off the water." At the time of Pentland's visit, only six mines were operating (Joseph Barclay Pentland, Report on Bolivia, 1974 [1827], p. 190.

I stayed off the mountain but can tell you that the core of the city is another tight grid.

We're on Calle Hoyos and very close to the 4030. We're also approaching the cathedral, which of course fronts the plaza. Attention: get used to lots of very slow traffic. Potosí today is a city of 250,000 people, and the streets can't handle the load. It's a point in favor of courtyard houses.

The plaza is, as always, a gathering place. The yellow building was apparently the original mint, in operation for two centuries from the 1570s. (See the museum guide to the Casa Nacional de Moneda Potisí, published by the Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia, 2007, p. 14)

A block below the plaza (and the cathedral), a much grander mint opened about 1750. The mines by then were in decline.

The mestizo-styled entrance.

An interior courtyard in the mint.

Out back: smelting ovens.

We're back to the plaza and the cathedral.

What is this, Lady Liberty disrespected! Where are those lese-majeste laws when we need them?

We've come around to the back door of the cathedral, because the front door is closed except for Sunday services. This one will open if you buy a ticket.

It's another 19th century replacement.

A few bits are old, like this medallion of Santiago Matamoros going about his regular chores, butchering Muslims.

The original church doors survive, too, though they're been relocated to the back.

Here's another relic. It's the surviving tower of a Jesuit church, noteworthy because you can climb up.

Careful.

The building in the foreground is a girl's school, the Santa Rosa College.

The wonderful Merced church is farther uphill on the same Calle Hoyos as the Jesuit tower, the mint, and the cathedral. Doesn't get much attention but hang onto your hat.

The church is original, built between 1570 and 1620.

Nave.

Ceiling to gasp for. Remember the San Francisco church in Sucre? It has something similar to this, but I miserably failed to see it.

The roof above the altar isn't so arresting.

Still farther uphill, this is the Church of San Martín. Not another church, you mutter. I get it, but hang on a minute.

Here's the nave.

Wall and ceiling.

You're still underwhelmed, but here's a recent monument, said to represent the grotto of the Virgin of Copacabana. And... you're getting really impatient.

But here is a famous painting by Melchor Pérez de Holguín (1660-1732). It's from 1716 and is called "The Entrance of Archbishop Viceroy Morcillo into Potosí." The church on the right is the very same church of San Martín. To its right is an arch corresponding to the modern grotto of the Virgin. (The upper left inset shows the cathedral of the day.) There's an opulence here you'll have a hard time finding in the city today, except perhaps for that wonderful ceiling in the Merced church. Morcillo (1642-1730), by the way, was versatile. Not content with serving as both archbishop and viceroy, he was active in the Inquisition, too. Surprised? Of course you are. "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Here's Cerro Rico seen from approximately the corner where the procession turned on its way down to the cathedral.

The city now leans heavily on tourists, for whom this street near the plaza has been repaved.

And for whom this shop opened.

A street seems traditional until you read the sign. On the other hand, foreigners living in Potosi in the 19th went crazy from boredom. Consider Edmond Temple, who spent a year here. "There is not probably in the world a town of such extent, and possessing so many inhabitants as Potosi, where there is so little society, and where there are no means of amusement, beyond the resources that persons may possess within themselves." (Travels in Various Parts of Peru, 1830, vol. 2, p. 192.)

The indigenous population doesn't seem bored and isn't going anywhere.

The cops were taking it easy, too.

The market was busy as always.

You could take pictures here all day long, although it would be a lot better if you knew how to ask permission in Quechua, which is more widely spoken here than Spanish. (Not that I speak that, either.)

Here's an extra.

For a professional photographer's view of the city, see Stephen Ferry's I Am Rich Potosi, the Mountain That Eats Men, 1999.

Here's an old courtyard house with an elaborate mestizo entrance.

Why the guard? I didn't know, so I stuck my nose in the door. Any bets what I found?

The place had been converted to a bank. Along with gas stations, it's another opportunity for Bolivians to practice patience.

We're heading out of town through the Devil's Gate.

Don Juan de Pendones, a soldier in the service of Pizarro and later the owner of a mine at Potosí, thought that this, the Cayara Valley about ten miles west of Potosí, looked like a good place to build a home. It took him a decade or so to secure formal title from Philip II, but it came in 1557 and established Bolivia's first hacienda, the Hacienda Cayara.

Of course there were already people here: they were the ones who terraced the hillsides, presumably to grow potatoes, but, as we say with droll humor, Pendones stole the land fair and square. He did well enough that in the 1570s the famous (some would say infamous) viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo chose to stay here rather than in Potosí.

The land today is still worked, though not on the hillsides and largely with machinery.

A new orchard is planted.

The hacienda itself is part museum and part hotel.

Courtyard.

Fires in the fireplace morning and evening.

A spectacular library. Antonio Sucre is said to have slept in that bed.

The in-house chapel.

The chapel contains the graves of several family members of the hacienda owners. Remember Luis Soux? The builder of the suspension bridge? He owned the hacienda for a while.

He also built, half a mile upstream, Bolivia's first hydroelectric plant. Here are the penstocks.

And the powerhouse.

Eng. Soux keeps an eye on things.

Meanwhile, back in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, people are wandering around the statue of Ignacio Warnes (1772-1816). Of course you're never heard of him, but he was governor of Santa Cruz until he came to the defense of a rebel force. With his help, the rebels were winning until Warnes was shot dead. The rebels then collapsed, surrendered, and were executed. And so we have celebratory ribbons.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." Protestors on the Santa Cruz plaza seek liberty for political prisoners.