From The Sublime To The Surreal: The Enigma Which Is La Paz 

We enter the city of La Paz and find ourselves in a place where lurking just beneath the veneer of an ordinary large city there are strange stories, mysterious behaviours and rituals from a different era. This is a city where dozens of witches still practice, where shrivelled animal embryos are on sale, where families buy human skulls and keep them in their home for good luck, where a museum celebrates and documents the history of cocaine, where public transport is a network of cable car lines. After all these years of knowing smugly that La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, it turns out that it’s not even the capital…..it’s difficult to know where to start…so let’s try starting at the beginning…

Approaching La Paz is so spectacular. The huge city sits at the bottom of the deep valley formed by the Prado River within the Altiplano, whilst 550 metres above it at 4,150m is the neighbouring city of the appropriately named El Alto – the bus route comes through the latter, meaning that we gorge on incredible views across the whole of La Paz to the snow capped mountains beyond even before we arrive.  Below us the network of cable car lines – there are ten in all – crisscross the city with remarkable angles of climb and descent, servicing most of the districts and providing cheap transport (33p per ride) for those who need it. As we are to discover, it’s certainly quicker than the congested streets.

In fact simply riding the network for the sake of it is one of the must-do’s of La Paz, such is the almost unique experience of being able to study such a spectacular city from above. It’s a bit like having a London Underground in the sky, with mountains to climb instead of tunnels to burrow through. As well as using the system out of necessity, we spend a happy couple of hours just switching lines on a circular route simply to enjoy as many different views of this magnificent landscape as possible.

Even the bus journey to get here had its quirks. Our previous base of Copacabana is in an odd situation geographically. Sited on a peninsula stretching out into Lake Titicaca, its only land borders are with Peru – the rest of its own country, Bolivia, is across the water. So, about an hour into the bus journey from there to La Paz, passengers cross the narrow strait on a pod type ferry while the bus and driver make their way over on a flat barge, reuniting in the village opposite.

Once inside the city of La Paz, the seat of Government but, it turns out, not the capital, it isn’t long before its unique characteristics begin to unfold. Initially the impact is one of manic activity: traffic clogs the streets and crowds jam the sidewalks, collectivos seem to form at least half of what’s on the road and lengthy queues of people waiting for goodness knows what snake around corners. Steep hills appear unexpectedly, dropping or climbing at acute angles. La Paz feels alive from the first minute. And then pretty soon we start to peel back the surface….

We had heard plenty about the Mercado de Brujas (witches’ market) in La Paz, but apart from a few dried out baby llama bodies it turns out to be not much more than a tourist souvenir street – but when we later visit the second Mercado de Brujas, in El Alto, things take a much more mystical, perhaps sinister, turn. There really are dozens of practicing witches here, and it definitely isn’t a tourist gimmick, indeed tourists are actively discouraged from visiting this part of El Alto unguided.

Behind the gigantic El Alto street market – at 5km long the biggest in South America – there are rows of tiny sheds, each one concealing a witch going about her business. And that business consists of not only looking into their clients’ futures, but also of casting spells on their clients’ enemies, and of course healing all manner of ills through the use of potions and familiars. Some of these, even the dried out embryos of a variety of birds and animals, are on open sale in the market, available for purchase by said witches for their ritualistic purposes. Our guide here, Mattheus, insists that not only is he a regular client of these witches, but so is absolutely everyone he knows, from all walks of life. Michaela and I intended to have our fortunes told here, but today is Corpus Christi, and regrettably it turns out that witches observe public holidays just like the rest of us, so we move on, uninformed on our futures.

Mattheus walks us through the unbelievable market and explains how El Alto came to exist, it being a young city less than fifty years old. As people gravitated towards La Paz from rural areas in search of work, they set up home on the mountainside, unable to afford homes down in the main city. These rural folk, usually agricultural workers, had no previous concept of how taxation works, and refused to contribute if they had no control over how their taxes were spent. Consequently, El Alto was granted a Council with financial autonomy to enable the new community to make its own decisions, a system which is still largely in place today. Unsurprisingly, an independent city grew around this principle to its current population of over half a million. That’s half a million on top of the 2 million down the hill in La Paz.

Our walking tour with Mattheus also takes in the colossal and bizarre “official” cemetery of La Paz (yes, there are unofficial ones where the poorer families sneak in and bury the dead when no one’s looking), with its multi storey burial chambers in multiple rows. Each “plot” commands a monthly rent, and if the family fall behind with payment, the corpse is evicted and disposed of – and, in many cases, the skull is sold to a new owner (see below). The maximum “lease” of a site in the cemetery is five years, after which the family have to find a new home for the remains of their loved one.

Why would a skull be a sellable item? Because, as Mattheus explains, every home in La Paz has a skull, sometimes the skull of a relative, sometimes a skull bought on the open market. At times when a family member needs advice, or faces a dilemma, they will sit and talk it through with the household skull, and receive subliminal messages to guide them to the correct decision. But here’s the seriously crazy bit – it’s necessary during this “consultation” for both the living person and the skull to smoke a cigarette. Yep, a smoking cigarette is placed in the jaws of the skull, smoke being, it seems, a conduit for messages from beyond the grave.

As if our walking tour with Mattheus didn’t lead us into enough bizarre territory, our other days, unguided, lead us to some equally surreal places. The coca museum, tiny but hugely informative and interesting, is tucked away in a courtyard in central La Paz. Starting with the use of coca leaves by indigenous people through the centuries, we move on to the creation of cocaine through the addition of chemicals to the coca leaf base.

As an analogy, the text uses grapes. As in, it’s possible to get drunk on wine, which is made from grapes, but eating a bunch of grapes doesn’t get you drunk. Similarly, coca leaves have huge health benefits, especially at high altitude, and cocaine is made from coca, but consuming the leaves doesn’t take you on a cocaine trip. The museum, as it moves through the evolution of cocaine, then becomes even more fascinating. Cocaine was the father of anaesthetic, the first ever knock out drug for the performance of surgical operations, used enthusiastically by renowned surgeons in many countries. Before cocaine, the concept of anaesthetics simply didn’t exist.

Coca cafe, La Paz

Sigmund Freud was cited as the world’s very first cocaine addict and, as the dangers of addiction became more evident, cocaine shifted from its status as a medical miracle to a new position as an illegal substance, leading to the multi billion dollar industry which exists today. With a mixture of shock tactics and what feels like misplaced admiration, there is even a section detailing just how much money can be, and has been, made from cocaine production, including the fact that one drugs baron once offered to pay off Bolivia’s entire national debt in return for immunity from prosecution.

Inspired by the medicinal qualities of coca, an American entrepreneur by the name of John Pemberton marketed an exotic wine named Vin Mariani (named after its creator) which incorporated coca leaves into the distillation process and which sold extremely well in his home country. When America became gripped by Prohibition, Pemberton had to rethink his product as a non-alcoholic beverage with the same level of appeal….and Coca-Cola was born. The recipe hasn’t changed since, coca leaves are still an essential ingredient of the fizzy drink we know today, hence, of course, the name. (Note: Wikipedia doesn’t quite agree with this story but this is how it is told in the museum). 

So, we’ve seen the witches, ridden the cable cars, learned everything there is to know about cocaine, imagined having a smoke with a skull and felt hot sun and cold air simultaneously. Surely that’s it as far as the offbeat and bizarre is concerned? Oh no…

Enter the fighting cholitas. Cholita has long been a derogatory term for indigenous women, particularly those who have led downtrodden lives dominated by the males of society. Now, with the term retaken into ownership by those women, there is a new found pride in being a “cholita”, sporting the instantly identifiable combination of bowler-type hats, colourful shawls and wide beamed skirts – and in being assertive as never before.

But…wrestling? Yep, “cholita wrestling” has become a source of La Paz/El Alto entertainment. It’s a brash, overtly touristy (though the locals love it too) ostentatious event, where ladies incongruously sporting traditional dress battle out WWE style wrestling before a baying crowd. It’s ridiculous, colourful, energetic and as outrageous as you can imagine, but these women and girls are unbelievably acrobatic. Flying kicks, somersaults, being thrown upside down, crashing to the floor…it’s all here. Even leaping into the ring from a balcony.

The show is a crazy mix of gymnastics, choreography and athleticism, not to mention pantomime style dramatics as each bout has a goodie and a baddie, the latter often abetted by a biased – male – referee. Of course, the goodie wins every time, roared on by the voracious crowd while the baddie malevolently milks the boos. With a nod in the direction of ridding a history of male oppression, the referee usually ends up being as battered by the goodie as the defeated cholita. It’s two hours of ridiculous fun during which you cannot help but be in awe of the athleticism. These ladies are FIT (and they’re not tiny either!).

Amid all the surreality of the enigma which is La Paz, we make one excursion out of the city to the pre-Columbian archeological site at Tiwanaku which is impressive both in its size and for the amount of historical insight it has provided through the many artefacts recovered over the years. Unfortunately, at a site which lends itself to free exploration (designated pathways, informative signs in English, much of interest) our guide for the day insists on keeping the group together, talking for far too long about each item and, inexplicably, spending more than half the allocated time in the museum before we even venture out onto the site. Consequently we don’t even get to see half of what is there.

La Paz boasts so many unusual facets, so many experiences which are genuinely different, yet its surface gives none of this away; it’s a bustling, busy city with differing districts – an older quarter, open plazas, modern business districts and distinct suburbs. Everything in fact that you would expect to find in a capital city…oh, except it turns out it’s not the capital.

It’s hot at the same time as being cold – at times when the temperature is in single figures, the direct sunlight is fierce and capable of reddening the skin in minutes. Two early mornings even brought a shower of rain, the very first drop we’ve seen in our seven weeks in South America. 

To say La Paz is a city of character is an understatement. Yet, you could easily come here and miss every one of these hidden mysteries, because on the surface it’s just another of the world’s bustling cities going about its own business like any other place. 

Once you’ve broken through the facade and learned just a little of its culture, you look down from your cable car and wonder what’s going on beneath every rooftop. Someone down there is enjoying a cigarette with a human skull, someone else has just cast a spell on an enemy. And somewhere down there there’s a lady in traditional dress heading for the wrestling ring. Next door, no doubt, to the office worker who just finished his nine to five.

La Paz. An enigma of a city. And it’s not even the capital.