La Paz

Why La Paz works

La Paz sits in a canyon carved by the Choqueyapu River, its neighbourhoods stacked up the surrounding slopes from the relatively lower, wealthier centre to El Alto, the sprawling Aymara city on the rim above at over 4,000 metres, technically a separate municipality but functionally La Paz's largest suburb. The Mi Teleferico cable car network, built from 2014 onward, now forms the world's largest urban aerial transit system, its ten-plus lines gliding silently over the canyon's chaotic traffic and delivering views across the entire city to the snow-capped bulk of Illimani, the 6,438-metre peak that watches over La Paz from the east. The Witches' Market (Mercado de las Brujas) in the city centre sells dried llama fetuses, herbal remedies, and ritual items used in Aymara offerings to Pachamama, a genuinely functioning market for locals rather than a staged tourist attraction, tucked among more conventional textile and souvenir stalls. San Francisco Church, a 16th-century mestizo-baroque landmark, anchors the plaza of the same name, a gathering point for street performers, shoe-shiners, and the periodic political demonstrations La Paz is known for. The Valle de la Luna on the city's southern outskirts offers an eroded lunar landscape of clay spires, an easy half-day trip, while the Death Road (Camino de las Yungas) draws mountain bikers for a white-knuckle descent from over 4,600 metres down to subtropical Yungas valleys, a drop of more than 3,600 metres in a single ride. At this altitude, most visitors need a day or two to acclimatise — coca tea, offered virtually everywhere, is the local remedy of choice — before tackling the city's dramatic verticality on foot.

Trip Snapshot

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