Bolivia

Overview

Bolivia is a spectacularly beautiful country split into two parts between the altiplano in the Andes and the Amazon rainforest. However, it is noticeably poorer than its South American neighbours and should only really be visited by those who like packing both a good sense of humour and their own loo paper.

The country's de facto capital, La Paz, is the highest capital in the world at 3800m above sea level and boasts a truly incredible city horizon, while not far away from La Paz is situated Lake Titicaca, the highest large lake in the world and the largest in South America, where boat trips can take you to meet the people of the floating reed islands. Potosí in the south has both a rich and tragic past as the most famous mining town of the Spanish empire which delivered a huge amount of silver and precious metals into European hands as well as a huge number of indigenous people and black Africans to their unmarked graves. The 12000 square km salt flats of the Uyuni are accessible via four wheel drive excursion with stunning views of the wet salt reflecting the sky while islands and lakes in the flats offer visitors the opportunity to see ancient cacti and flamingos.

History

The first inhabitants arrived in this part of the world from Asia about 20000 years ago. They were primarily hunter-gatherer tribes among whose achievements can be attributed the domestication of animals such as the llama, alpaca and guinea-pig and the cultivation of cotton, beans and squashes throughout the regions that are now modern day Peru and Bolivia.

By 1000 BC these tribal peoples began to develop what we would now recognise as a regional culture in art, religion and agricultural methods, but, for unknown reasons these began to diversify into individual pockets of expertise. By 700BC the Tiahuanaco people had developed an extensive civilisation around the shores of Lake Titicaca in Alto Peru - now known as Bolivia. These advances included the devolvement of advanced irrigation systems for arable farming and a road network. Relics of the Tiahueanaco city can still be found but mystery surrounds what happened to these people.

The Incas replaced the Tiahueanaco as the most prosperous group in Bolivia, after their expansion out of the Peruvian city of Cuzco from 1440. They suppressed other local tribes and absorbed their wealth into their own empire. This was rarely a popular exercise, and hence when the Spanish arrived in the 1530s, while huge, the Inca Empire was not united and so quickly fell to the better-armed, more determined Spaniards.

The Spanish founded Sucre (then known as La Plata) as their new capital and the European culture was spread across the region by the ever-onwards-marching conquistadors. Silver was discovered and mines were...more