The Alasitas Festival is a month-long traditional market event that starts on 24th January in La Paz, where locals buy small, thumb-sized miniature replicas of things they hope to bring about in the coming year. It’s grounded in ancient Andean ways of making wishes real, and the celebration centres on Ekeko, the god of abundance….
Festival de Gran Poder is La Paz’s most extravagant cultural and religious street festival. It happens every year, late May or early June. You can see over 40,000 indigenous dancers and musicians moving through the city in a long procession, all to honour Jesus Christ. For many people, it feels like this event is a…
If you want to explore the local vineyards, you can book a half-day or full-day “Ruta del Vino” tour via agencies close to Tarija’s main plaza, or alternatively hire a private taxi to keep things more independent, with a custom route. Tarija’s wine tourism really connects modern large industrial producers like Campos de Solana with…
Singani is Bolivia’s national distilled spirit, a smooth, unaged aromatic brandy made only from Muscat of Alexandria grapes, grown high in the Bolivian Andes. Unlike other grape brandies, such as pisco, Singani keeps a strict Appellation of Origin, which basically means it cannot be replaced by a similar product. Legally, the grapes have to be…
Most of the Bolivian wine, like really the vast majority, is grown in Tarija, close to the Argentine border. That zone is well known worldwide for making “high-altitude wines,” where the vineyards are set from roughly 1,600 to 2,100 metres above sea level. At such extreme heights, the vines are hit with intense solar radiation,…
A salteña is Bolivia’s signature national snack, a distinctive baked empanada filled with a sweet, slightly spicy, thickened stew of beef or chicken, potatoes, and hard-boiled egg. Most people say the best place to eat them is at a dedicated salteñería, earlier, before noon. Since the inside is basically a hot liquid broth, eating a…
Traditional Bolivian street food is famously filling, carb-rich, and bursting with flavour. It’s built around key standbys like salteñas (baked meat pastries), anticuchos (grilled beef heart on skewers), tucumanas (deep-fried empanadas), and choripán (chorizo sandwiches). You’ll notice the street stalls run on a pretty strict daily rhythm. In the morning, tucumanas plus salteñas take over…
The Oruro Carnival happens every year around February, or sometimes early March, and it lines up nicely with the Catholic liturgical calendar. The big 20-hour parade, called the Entrada, is held on the Saturday right before Ash Wednesday. UNESCO recognises it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the whole thing turns into this…
The altitude in central La Paz is about 3,640 metres, or 11,942 feet, above sea level. And since the city is built into a steep canyon, you can actually see elevations jump, from roughly 3,200 metres in the more affluent southern areas up to more than 4,100 metres in El Alto. That kind of extreme…
Temperatures on the higher glaciers of Huayna Potosí stay dangerously low, often landing somewhere between -10°C and -15°C (14°F to 5°F) as climbers start the midnight push. If you factor in hard alpine winds plus chill, the felt temperature can drop to about -25°C (-13°F) fast. Getting through it and making the summit usually comes…