La Paz doesn't wait for you to adjust.
You land at 4,000 metres and the city is already in motion. Cable cars thread between neighbourhoods stacked against the mountains. In the Witches' Market, stalls sell dried herbs, ritual objects and remedies for problems that don't have names in other languages. The Aymara women in their bowler hats and layered skirts move through it all with a composure the altitude seems to give them. Ask one of them about the market and she will tell you more about the relationship between plants and illness than most medical textbooks contain.
Beyond the city the altiplano opens, enormous, treeless, the sky taking up most of what you see. The Aymara festivals are not performances. They are obligations, expressions of reciprocity with a landscape that demands it. Tiwanaku and Puma Punku predate the Inca by thousands of years, their stones cut to tolerances that still challenge explanation.
The Salar de Uyuni, in the rainy season, becomes the largest mirror on earth, sky above, sky below, the horizon gone.
- Descend into La Paz, a city already in motion at 4,000 metres
- Wander the Witches' Market and its remedies for problems without names
- Explore the sunken courtyard of Tiwanaku, lined with hundreds of stone faces
- Walk the vast altiplano as the Andes fall away behind you
BEST TIME TO TRAVEL
May–October : For dry season and clearest skies.
November–March : For the Salar de Uyuni mirror effect.
why we return
The Salar de Uyuni
The scale brings you to the still point without asking. The salt, the sky, the silence. Something clears.
Tiwanaku and Puma Punku
A sunken courtyard lined with hundreds of stone faces, each one different, some resembling features from cultures thousands of miles away. megalithics that seem to belong to another world.
Isla del Sol at sun rise on lake Titicaca
Where the sun was born. The stillness and the crisp light of the altitude on the water earns the name.
Travel to
Bolivia
with us
