Bolivia

The Altiplano around Lake Titicaca was the heartland of Tiwanaku, a major pre-Inca civilisation, before the Inca absorbed the region. The Spanish arrived in the 1530s and, in 1545, found silver at Cerro Rico above Potosí. For a century Potosí was the largest and richest city in the Americas, its mines worked under a deadly forced-labour system that killed countless Indigenous and enslaved African people, and its silver bankrolling the Spanish empire.

Independence was won in 1825 and the country named for Simón Bolívar. The next century and a half brought repeated territorial losses — the Pacific coast to Chile in 1879–83, the Acre rubber lands to Brazil, much of the Chaco to Paraguay — and chronic instability. The 1952 National Revolution brought universal suffrage, nationalised the tin mines, and began land reform.

In 2006 Evo Morales, a former coca-growers' union leader, became Bolivia's first Indigenous president, cutting poverty during a commodity boom and rewriting the constitution as a "plurinational state." A disputed 2019 election led to his resignation and departure — his supporters call it a coup — a caretaker government, and a decisive win for his party under Luis Arce in 2020. Since then the party has split and the economy has deteriorated badly, with dollar and fuel shortages.

Culture on the Altiplano is strongly Aymara and Quechua — in language, in dress such as the cholita's bowler hat and layered skirts, and in a worldview where offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth, sit comfortably alongside Catholic practice. La Paz's Witches' Market sells the herbs, figurines, and dried llama foetuses used in these blessings.

Festivals are spectacular. The Carnaval de Oruro fills two days with the Diablada devil dance and dozens of other troupes; the Gran Poder parades through La Paz. Music of panpipes, quena flutes, and the small charango lute is everywhere, and "cholita wrestling" has become a La Paz spectacle with real roots in women's assertiveness.

The lowland department of Santa Cruz has a distinct camba identity — more tropical, more mestizo, and often at political odds with the highland colla world. Football is a national passion, and Bolivia's team is feared by visitors at altitude.

Bolivia has two capitals in practice: Sucre, the constitutional capital and seat of the courts, and La Paz, the seat of government and the highest capital city in the world, set in a canyon with the sprawling city of El Alto on the rim above it. Santa Cruz, in the lowlands, has become the largest city and the economic engine.

The economy has leaned on natural gas exports, mining, and agriculture, and the recent slump in gas output and the dollar shortage have hit hard, bringing queues, shortages, and frequent protest. Much of working life is informal, run through markets and family networks.

Altitude shapes everyday routines on the Altiplano, and the divide between the cool, Indigenous highlands and the hot, fast-growing lowlands runs through the country's politics, economy, and sense of itself.

Bolivian cooking is hearty and starch-heavy, built on potatoes — this is part of the potato's homeland, with hundreds of varieties and the freeze-dried chuño — along with corn, quinoa, and, in the lowlands, rice and plantain. Salteñas, juicy baked meat-and-vegetable pasties, are the mid-morning national snack.

The main meal is a set lunch of soup then a main course. Signature dishes include pique macho (a heap of beef, sausage, chips, and egg), silpancho (breaded pounded beef over rice and potato with a fried egg), and fricasé (a pork and hominy stew). Trout comes from Lake Titicaca and lean llama meat from the highlands.

Singani, a white-grape brandy, is the national spirit and the base of the chuflay. Coca-leaf tea and chewing coca are legal, normal, and genuinely help with the altitude.

The Salar de Uyuni is the headline: a 10,000-square-kilometre salt flat, usually visited on a one-to-three-day 4x4 tour from Uyuni that also takes in the cactus-covered Incahuasi "island," the Train Cemetery, and, to the south, the red and green lakes, flamingos, geysers, and hot springs of the Eduardo Avaroa reserve near the Chilean border. In the wet season the flat becomes a mirror.

La Paz rewards a few days for its setting, its cable-car network, the Witches' Market, and the eroded Valle de la Luna. Nearby, Lake Titicaca and the roadless Isla del Sol are reached from the pilgrim town of Copacabana, and the ruins of Tiwanaku, with the Gate of the Sun, are an easy day trip.

Potosí offers tours into the still-working cooperative silver mines of Cerro Rico and the colonial mint, and Sucre is a white-walled UNESCO city with a cliff of dinosaur footprints on its edge. For wildlife, Madidi National Park and the pampas around Rurrenabaque are the gateway to Amazon rainforest and river life.