Bolivia
A landlocked, high, and deeply indigenous land, heir to Tiwanaku and the Inca, marked by the silver mountain that once enriched an empire, and built on the bond between its peoples, their earth, and one another. The complete guide, the forces first.
Bolivia is a landlocked country in the heart of South America, a high and rugged land that is the most indigenous nation of the continent. Some twelve million people live there, spread across three sharply different worlds: the cold, treeless high plateau of the Andes, the gentler valleys below it, and the tropical lowlands to the east. Bolivian life rests on a few deep forces. The first is its indigenous heart, the living world of the Aymara and Quechua peoples and the dozens of others, heirs of the Inca and of great civilizations before them, whose identity is now the official ground of the state. The second is the bond with the earth, the reverence for Mother Earth and the spirits, blended with the Catholic faith. The third is the high, landlocked land itself, which shapes everything from the air people breathe to the sea they still mourn. The fourth is the long shadow of the silver mountain of Potosi, the colonial centuries, and the mixing of peoples it brought. From these flow a hearty highland table, some of the most spectacular festivals on earth, the proud figure of the city woman in her skirt and bowler hat, and a deep spirit of community.
The indigenous heart
The deepest force in Bolivian life is its indigenous heart, for Bolivia is the most indigenous country in South America, a place where the native peoples are not a remnant but a majority and the living ground of the nation. Two great highland peoples stand at its centre. The Aymara hold the high plateau and the shores of Lake Titicaca, and their world reaches into the city of La Paz and the vast Aymara city of El Alto above it; the Quechua, heirs of the language of the Inca, fill the fertile valleys around Cochabamba and Sucre. Beyond the highlands live dozens of smaller peoples of the eastern lowlands and forests, each with its own tongue and ways.
Their past runs deep. Long before the Inca, the great civilization of Tiwanaku rose on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, and its carved sun gate and stonework are still emblems of Aymara identity today; later the whole region was joined to the Inca empire. Through the centuries of Spanish rule and the republic that followed, the indigenous peoples were governed, used, and pushed to the margins, yet they never lost their languages, their dress, their communities, or their hold on the land.
In our own day that long endurance has become a force at the centre of the nation. Bolivia now calls itself a plurinational state, one country made of many peoples, recognising dozens of indigenous nations and their languages alongside Spanish, and flying beside its tricolour the wiphala, the square many-coloured flag of the Andean peoples. The old identity, once scorned, is now a source of pride and power. To understand Bolivia is to begin with its indigenous heart.
Mother Earth and the spirits
From that indigenous root grows the second force, a way of seeing the earth and the high places as living and holy. At its centre is Mother Earth, whom the Andean peoples call Pachamama, the living earth who gives food and life and must be honoured and fed in return. Bolivians make offerings to her, above all in August, her month, and constantly tip the first drops of any drink onto the ground for her before they drink, a small daily blessing they call the ch'alla. The mountains and many places hold their own spirits, fed with the same offerings.
Through it all runs the coca leaf, sacred in the Andes since the earliest times, chewed against hunger, cold, and the thin air, offered to the earth and the spirits, and read by ritual specialists to tell what is to come. In the markets one finds the Aymara ritual reader, the yatiri, and whole stalls of coca, herbs, charms, and offerings for sale. A cheerful little household god of plenty is laden each year with tiny tokens of all that a family hopes to gain.
When the Spanish brought the Catholic faith, the two ways grew together rather than apart, and most Bolivians live easily in both at once. The same person prays to Christ and the saints in church and offers drink to Mother Earth at home, and the great festivals honour a Christian Virgin and the earth and the mountains in a single celebration. This blended faith, Christian on the surface and Andean beneath, runs through the whole of Bolivian life.
The high, landlocked land
Bolivia is shaped to its core by being high, rugged, and shut off from the sea. Down its western side runs the great cold high plateau the people call the Altiplano, a vast treeless tableland near the roof of the inhabited world, ringed by snow peaks and holding most of the highland cities. There sits La Paz, the highest seat of government on earth, its houses climbing the walls of a great canyon, with the Aymara city of El Alto spread on the rim above. The air is thin enough to leave a newcomer breathless, and the highland cold, the bright sun, and the long views are the daily setting of life.
The land falls away into three worlds that can feel like three countries. The high plateau gives way to the gentler valleys of the centre and south, warmer and green, the garden country of Cochabamba and the wine of Tarija; and beyond the mountains spread the hot tropical lowlands of the east, the plains and forests around the booming city of Santa Cruz. Highland people and lowland people differ in food, speech, and self-image, and do not always feel themselves one nation. Among the wonders of the high country are Lake Titicaca, shared with Peru, and a vast white salt flat that holds one of the world's great stores of lithium.
One absence is felt across all of it. Bolivia once reached the Pacific, but lost its coast to Chile in a war near the end of the nineteenth century, and has been landlocked ever since. The lost sea is mourned to this day, marked each year and kept alive as a national longing, a reminder of how deeply the shape of the land has set the shape of the country.
The silver mountain and the mixing
No single thing marked Bolivia's history more than a mountain of silver. At Potosi, in the southern highlands, rises the Rich Mountain, found by the Spanish in the sixteenth century to hold the greatest store of silver the world had ever known. For two centuries its ore was the treasure of the Spanish empire and flowed across the world, and the city below it grew into one of the largest on earth. The silver was torn out by the forced labour of indigenous people and of Africans brought in bondage, in numbers and in suffering so great that the mountain earned a darker name, the one that eats men.
That mountain stands at the centre of Bolivia's colonial story, the long Spanish centuries when the highlands were ruled from afar and the indigenous and the Spanish, and the Africans among them, mingled into a new people. Most Bolivians today are of mixed descent, while very many remain fully indigenous; the African thread survives in the warm lowland valleys and in the music and dance of the country.
The mountain also left a faith of its own. The miners, Catholic above ground, honour beneath it the lord of the underworld they call El Tio, a horned figure set up in the dark of the shafts, to whom they offer coca, drink, and tobacco for their safety and their luck, for the riches and the dangers of the deep are felt to be his to give. Potosi still gives up poorer metals to this day, its miners still make their offerings, and the silver mountain remains the great dark thread running through Bolivian history.
The table
Bolivian food is hearty fare built for the cold and the heights, and it leans on the ancient crops of the Andes. The potato is its heart, grown in hundreds of native kinds, and freeze-dried in the highland frost into a light store that keeps for years, the chuño that has fed these mountains since before the Inca. Beside it stand quinoa, the high grain rich in strength, maize in many forms, and the chili pepper, milder than it looks, with a fresh hot sauce always on the table.
The dishes are filling and homely. The most loved of all is the salteña, a baked pastry filled with a rich, juicy stew of meat, potato, egg, and olives, eaten in the mid morning, a pause so fixed that the late-morning break is named for it. The valley city of Cochabamba is famous for its huge plates, a breaded cutlet over rice and potato, or a heaped dish of beef, sausage, and chips. There are thick soups against the cold, of peanut or of dried meat and freeze-dried potato; there is the meat of the llama and the dried meat of the highlands.
Drink is warm and often shared. A thick hot purple-corn drink starts a cold morning; a mild corn beer is poured at country festivals, its first drops always to the earth; and the national spirit is a clear grape brandy called singani, drunk in cocktails. Tea made from the coca leaf is offered against the thin air. Behind all of it stands the long, unhurried family lunch, the great meal of the day, and the bustling markets, many of their stalls kept by women in skirt and bowler hat, where the country comes to eat and to trade. To share a Bolivian table is to be warmed against the cold of the heights.
The festival year
Bolivia keeps some of the most spectacular festivals on earth, and almost all of them join the Catholic faith to the older Andean one. The greatest is the Carnival of the mining city of Oruro, a vast days-long celebration in honour of a beloved Virgin, in which thousands of costumed dancers fill the streets. Its most famous dance is the diablada, the dance of devils, a whirl of horned and jewelled masks in which the powers of the underworld are met and mastered; another, the morenada, remembers in its slow heavy step the African slaves once brought to the silver mines. These dances are sacred performance, not mere display.
Other festivals turn on older Andean ground. At the festival of miniatures called Alasitas, held each January in La Paz, people buy tiny models of all they wish for in the year, a little house, a car, a diploma, and have them blessed, in the hope that the cheerful god of plenty Ekeko will make them real. August brings the offerings to Mother Earth, and the planting and harvest their own rites. Towns honour their patron saints and Virgins with great parades of dancing brotherhoods, and the country keeps Holy Week, Christmas, and the Day of the Dead, when families set out bread and food to welcome back their dead for a day.
Music runs through every gathering. The breathy panpipes and flutes of the Andes, the drums, and above all the small bright guitar called the charango, whose sound is the voice of the Bolivian highlands, carry the dances of the festivals and the songs of the home. Loud, devout, and dazzling, the festival year is one of the deepest joys of Bolivian life.
The cholita and Andean dress
The most striking figure of Bolivian life is the cholita, the indigenous city woman in her unmistakable dress, who has become a living symbol of the country. She wears a layered, full, pleated skirt called the pollera, with an embroidered shawl pinned at the shoulder, her hair in two long braids, and, perched above, a bowler hat. The hat has a curious history, brought to the highlands by British railway workers a century ago and taken up by Aymara women as their own; the skirt too began as a dress once forced upon them and has long since been claimed and worn with pride.
This is not a costume but daily clothing, worn by hundreds of thousands of women to the market, the office, and the bank. For much of the last century women in the skirt were looked down upon and shut out of fine places; in our own day they have reclaimed their standing in full, and the cholita is now a proud protagonist of modern life, a trader and a shopkeeper but also a lawyer, a singer, a fashion model, a mountain climber, and a wrestler before cheering crowds. The men of the highlands have their own woven ponchos and knitted caps with earflaps against the cold.
Behind the dress lies the great Andean craft of weaving, carried on since before the Inca. On simple looms the women spin and weave the wool of the llama and the alpaca into cloth of deep colour whose patterns carry meaning and mark each community, so that a person's home valley can be read in the weave they wear. In its dress above all, Bolivia carries its indigenous heritage not as memory but as living, daily pride.
Courtesy and community
Bolivian manners are warm, personal, and rooted in family and community. A greeting among friends and kin is unhurried and physical, a handshake, an embrace, a kiss on the cheek, and people give time to the courtesies of meeting and parting. Relations come before business, and a matter goes better begun with warmth and a little talk; respect for elders runs through it all.
The family is wide, reaching out through grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and wider still through the godparents bound to a child at its baptism or its wedding, a tie taken as seriously as blood. Beneath the family lies the old community of the highlands, the ayllu, the group of related families who hold land together and order village life, a form older than the Inca and living yet. From it comes a deep habit of mutual aid, neighbours turning out to help one another build, plant, and harvest, each family's labour repaid in kind, which Andean people call ayni, and the wider work the whole community gives for the common good.
Hospitality flows from the same spirit. A guest is fed and pressed to take more, and to pass a single cup around a circle, each drinking in turn after tipping the first drops to the earth, is the natural sign of fellowship. The highland people can be quiet and reserved with a stranger, slower to open than the warmer, more talkative people of the lowlands, but loyal once a bond is made. The visitor who greets warmly, respects the old, accepts the food and drink pressed upon them, and does not rush will find the Bolivian welcome generous and lasting.
The nation
Bolivia lies landlocked in the heart of South America, a high country of three worlds: the cold high plateau of the west, the gentle valleys of the centre and south, and the hot tropical lowlands of the east, which together hold some twelve million people. It is unusual in having two capitals, La Paz, the highest seat of government on earth, where the president and congress sit, and the white colonial city of Sucre, the seat of the courts; the fast-growing lowland city of Santa Cruz has become the largest and the heart of the economy. The country is the most indigenous in South America, and Spanish shares official standing with Quechua, Aymara, and dozens of other native tongues.
Its history is long and hard. The land held the great civilization of Tiwanaku and then the Inca before the Spanish came for the silver of Potosi and ruled for three centuries; the republic, won in 1825 and named for the liberator Simon Bolivar, then passed through a turbulent age of many governments and lost its seacoast to Chile. In the last lifetime the indigenous majority has risen to the centre of national life, remaking the country as a plurinational state of many peoples.
Today Bolivia is a democracy of striking variety, still poor and still divided between the highlands and the booming lowlands, yet rich in land and resource. Its wealth comes from its mines, now holding one of the world's great stores of lithium, from its natural gas, and from the farms of the eastern plains. Beneath the modern surface the old country holds firm: the high fields are farmed as ever, the old languages spoken, Mother Earth still thanked with a tipped cup, the great festivals still danced, and the bond between its many peoples and their high, ancient land still at the centre of everything.