Bolivia

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It’s time for a geography question.    I’m in a taxi heading into town from an airport.  I’ve never been to this airport or this town or this country.  Also, I’m alone.  I mention that because people are always telling me that when I get someplace new I should look up so-and-so.  “He’ll be a big help.” That’s probably true, but I never take the advice.  I want to look around for myself.  I lose something, for sure, but I gain more, or I think I do.

At the edge of town I’m startled by a John Deere dealership with tractors and planters and sprayers and combines.  A minute later we pass an International Harvester dealer with more of the same, just red instead of green.  Then we pass Massey Ferguson and New Holland and some less familiar brands: Hino, Komatsu, Mahindra, and Claas.  

So here’s the question: where am I?  

The obvious answer would be the American Midwest or Great Plains, but as I just said I was startled, which I wouldn’t be if this was Omaha or Topeka.  And of course I have been in this country.  I could be in Europe.  Maybe the plains in eastern Hungary.   I’ve never been east of Budapest, so maybe that guess is terrible.  Anyway, I’m not in Europe. South Africa and Australia are good guesses–not Cape Town or Sydney but Swellendam and Wagga Wagga.  But no, I’m not there either.  You might say that mechanization has arrived in Asia, and I’d agree, but I don’t think we’d find this big-boy lineup there.  In any case, I’m not in Asia.

Canada, as we know, loves to hide in plain sight, but that’s not the answer either, so now we’re pretty much reduced to South America, especially Brazil, where deep-pocketed pioneers are teaching the Amazon a thing or two.  

Why, in September of this year, 2024, I was in Riberalta, a growing town of 100,000 people an hour’s drive west of the Brazilian border.  Yes, this is Bolivia, and Riberalta is the world center for the production of Brazil nuts.  I challenge you to think of another food where eighty percent of the world’s production comes from the country next door to the country for which the food is named.  

I was in Riberalta for two nights, which was one longer than I had planned.  I got stuck because Ecojet, a Bolivian airline, dropped me off, then took off without bothering to say that all its Riberalta flights for the coming week had been canceled.  

The next morning I found out why.  I had woken up in the middle of the night cursing the smoker next door.  I stifled my gagging and somehow got back to sleep.  In the morning, the shy but friendly widow who ran the hotel used the translation software on her phone to tell me about the cancellations.   Then I saw on the internet that the town’s air-quality index was over 300.  That means hazardous.  Forget cigarettes. Think the Amazon on fire.  In the name of progress, of course.

I didn’t want to wait around for a flight that might operate in a week, or might not, so after poking around the town for a day I hired a taxi to take me to Rurrenabaque, a town about 300 miles west of Riberalta and smack at the foot of the Andes, which rise abruptly from the endless plains to the east. The air quality in Rurrenabaque was a bit over 200–officially unhealthy, but not hazardous–and I gambled that flights would be operating there.  I say gambled because Ecojet’s website didn’t say anything about “flight status,” and websites like Flightstats and Flightaware didn’t say anything about Ecojet.  

The taxi ride was, as we say, interesting.  I didn’t see flames, but mile after mile we drove through smoke drifting across the highway like fog on the Oregon coast.  It was a fine highway, a two-lane toll road, so instead of keeping an eye out for road hazards I just watched the blackened forest and ash-covered earth go by.  It was the first time I had ever seen capybaras in the wild; they were lazing by the side of a river.  My driver was amused by my excitement.

There was almost no traffic, but that wasn’t because of the fires or the tolls.   If you had seen the gas stations in Riberalta, you’d have understood.  I mean the stations had long lines of people needing gasoline, and they had much longer lines of people–mostly truckers–needing diesel. Diesel’s not produced domestically, and Bolivia can’t afford to import sufficient quantities, so truckers line up for blocks and wait for days.  “Tranquillo,” my driver kept telling me, and he was right.  His taxi ran on gasoline, and we only had to wait an hour and a bit.

A week or two later, in highland Bolivia, I would mention the fires, and people would say how upset they were by what was happening to the Amazon.  And a month after that, and back home, the Amazon air-quality indices were still high enough to make me swell with pride at belonging to the world’s ecologically dominant species.

But back to my geography question.  The expansion of agriculture in the Bolivian Amazon has produced, along with miles of ash and air that’s hard to breathe, a city that is now Bolivia’s most populous.  Everyone has heard of La Paz, but La Paz is in third place today, and Bolivia’s most populous city, and the answer to my question, is Santa Cruz.  It’s in the Amazon about 500 miles south of Riberalta, and it has a population of close to two million.  

I know, I know, you’re lost, so take my hand.  My drive through the smoke from Riberalta to Rurrenabaque hugged the Beni River.  That’s where I saw the capybaras.  If you’re an American, you’ve probably heard of capybaras but not of the Beni.  Not to worry.  As an old-fashioned geographer I can tell you that the Beni starts high in the Andes, near La Paz.  It emerges on the plains at Rurrenabaque and three hundred lazy miles later, at Riberalta, joins the Madre de Dios, which starts farther north, near Cusco, in the Peruvian Andes.  Together they join the Madeira, which joins the Solimoes, which at Manaus joins the Rio Negro and becomes the Man himself.  I’m sorry, I mean the Woman herself.  It’s a modest triumph for America’s school teachers that most of their students have heard of her.  I think.  I hope I’m not kidding myself.  

And so, to get to the agricultural metropolis of Santa Cruz and all its farm machinery, you just go up the Amazon to the Solimoes, then continue to the Madeira, the Mamore, the Grande, and finally the Piray.  That’s it.  You’re in Santa Cruz.  

Don’t feel bad that you’ve never heard of it.   The three biggest airlines in the United States all fly to Peru and Chile and Brazil and Argentina–yawn–but none of them bother with  Bolivia, so it’s only natural that most Americans know next to nothing about the country.  Perhaps they remember that Butch Cassidy may have died there.  You know: Newman and Redford and a woman whose name I have forgotten.  Sorry about that.  And of course Fidel Castro’s compadre.  He died in Bolivia for sure.  Everybody remembers that poster of him with his scraggly beard, his beret with its red star, and his confident anticipation of the socialist paradise.  You’d think I’d remember his name, but at the moment I don’t.  I do remember the socialist paradise, where everybody is equal except for those who are more equal.

Besides, it’s easy to get confused about Santa Cruz when the world has so many of them.  This one, to give it its full name, is Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a ridiculous name for Bolivia’s only big city that sits on a dead-flat plain.   The name only makes sense if you imagine travelers heading west 200 miles from Santa Cruz to Potosí, a town at the foot of a wonderfully pyramidal mountain whose interior happens to be threaded with veins of silver.   The name of the mountain is Cerro Rico.  Even I don’t need help translating that.

Potosí sits about 13,000 feet above sea level.  That’s about 12,000 feet higher than Santa Cruz de la Sierra, so a traveler in the old days heading west on foot or by mule might pause in Santa Cruz and wonder if he was out of his mind, especially if he knew that the grade in front of him wasn’t constant.  I eventually flew to Santa Cruz from Sucre, which is about fifty miles east of Potosí and four thousand feet below it.  The flight took about 30 minutes, but the drive between the two takes ten hours. We flew over ridge after ridge, up, down, up, down.  If you were walking or on a mule, you’d reconsider the idea of a loving God.

I doubt that many people in the old days actually made this journey.  Some silver did move east from Potosí: it could–I’m sorry, here I go again–have gone down the Pilcomayo to the Paraguay, then to the Parana and finally to the Rio de La Plata and the Atlantic.  After all, that’s why it’s called the Rio de La Plata, the River of Silver.  Come to think of it, that’s why the country down there is called Argentina.  It’s not because it produced the stuff.  

Most of Potosí’s silver, in any case, went north to Lima.  I don’t know why it went that way, but a long trail led to La Paz and then through Arequipa, Peru.  That’s why, three centuries after it was established, Santa Cruz de la Sierra still had fewer than 10,000 people.  

By 1950 it had about 40,000.  That’s a long way from two million, but the city had begun to grow.  Thank two railroads. Not the tracks that join Bolivia’s other cities to each other and to the Pacific Coast.  Rails have never linked Santa Cruz to those places.  Instead, Santa Cruz’s railroads run east to Brazil and south to Argentina.  Today, there are also highways. It’s a bit over 1,100 miles to Sao Paulo.  

What hath barley and corn and rice and soybeans and sorghum and sunflowers and wheat wrought in Santa Cruz?  I will tell you.  Suppose you’re in Bolivia, and in the tropical heat you’re dying for a Starbucks frappuccino.  There are probably better choices, but you’re a brand loyalist, and so you’ll be happy when I tell you that Bolivia has five Starbucks stores.  How many of them are in Santa Cruz?  Answer: all of them. It’s not a fluke.  Suppose you hate hotel surprises and so stick to the international chains.  You’re out of luck in La Paz and Cochabamba and Sucre and Potosi, and of course you’re out of luck in Riberalta and Rurrenabaque, but Santa Cruz has two Marriotts and a Hampton Inn by Hilton.  One of the Marriotts is a new high rise, and it’s very nice.  I recommend the ravioli.

I don’t know why you’d want a flashy shopping center in Bolivia, but Santa Cruz has one.  It’s the Ventura Mall, and it has a crowded food court with the usual suspects.  Santa Cruz also has Bolivia’s only Ralph Lauren store–lucky you–and you can get to it easily with Uber, which works well in Santa Cruz.  Uber pretends to work in La Paz and doesn’t even pretend in the rest of the country.  

So you’re already bored with Santa Cruz, but the city also has Bolivia’s only civilized international airport, which is why I was there in the first place.  Flights come from Sao Paulo on the east, Buenos Aires and Asunción to the south, and Santiago, Lima, and Panama City to the west.  Intercontinental flights come from Madrid and Miami.  Bolivia’s only other international airport is La Paz, and its international flights arrive only from Bogota, Lima, and Santiago.  Worse, and this is why I said that Santa Cruz has a civilized airport, all the international flights in and out of La Paz come and go at miserable times, unless you like 5 a.m. departures. 

It’s a bind, isn’t it?  Burn some tropical forest, create an agricultural empire, and, lo!, you too can have a shiny Mercedes dealership.   One more thing: the only gas station I saw in Bolivia where you didn’t have to wait was in Santa Cruz.  That was on my way out of the country, and I stared.

After a week in lowland Bolivia, Ecojet took me up from Rurrenabaque to La Paz.  I was grateful for a thirty-minute flight instead of a 16-hour drive, but I was near the back of the plane, and when nearly everyone else had gotten off I stood up and for half a minute thought I was in trouble.  I didn’t feel sick, wasn’t breathless, wasn’t headachey, but I was so lightheaded I wasn’t sure I could walk.  I managed, and that was my introduction to highland Bolivia, where I would vacillate between around 13,000 feet in La Paz and Potosí and around 9,000 feet in Sucre and Cochabamba. 

With the exception of Cochabamba, all these places are very hilly, and while I almost immediately got over the lightheadedness, I found that when walking uphill I often needed to sit for a minute.  Failing to find a convenient bench or step, I would lean against a lamppost and pretend I was trying to remember something very important.   Don’t laugh unless you’re old enough to remember where you were the day Joseph Stalin died.

I grew to like the thin air of these cities, but I’m still puzzled by the way people dressed.  Look at any photograph of people outdoors in  La Paz or Potosí, and everyone will be wearing jackets. That’s why in preparation for this trip I bought a fancy wool undershirt.  I never wore it.  The daytime temperatures were about 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  There was no wind, and the sunshine was strong enough that I often crossed to the shady side of the street.  If my Spanish or Quechua had been up to the task, I’d have asked people why they were wearing puffer jackets on a lovely Spring day.  Unable to do that, I sometimes felt a little out of place, like walking around in Subsaharan Africa and thinking that my skin is a weird color.

Until I got to La Paz, I had no idea that the city sits in a thousand-foot-deep canyon.  The canyon is overlooked on the north by Andean peaks high enough to be snow-capped, and it is overlooked on the south by a dead-level plateau, the Altiplano.  Between them, about three-quarters of a million people call the canyon home.

The city’s airport is close to the edge of that plateau at a place called, logically, El Alto. I got in a taxi that fought its way through miserable traffic.  Then we started down switchbacks that put San Francisco’s Lombard Street to shame. A few curves later, I asked the driver to stop so I could look back up to buildings peering over the jagged edge of the plateau.   Ahead of us, there were hundreds of high rises along the canyon axis, which was formed by a tributary of the Beni. The high rises had invaded a neighborhood of fine old homes from the 1920s, places built for an old elite that has mostly disappeared, or moved farther downstream, or moved to a high rise or perhaps to another city or country.  The slope on the far side of the canyon was dotted with thousands of small houses clinging to ground steep enough to induce the most dogmatic atheist to go to church regularly. 

On the face of it, the Spanish should have built La Paz on the plateau, but there was no water there until a pipeline was built early in the 20th century.  Since then, El Alto has grown to have more people than La Paz, while La Paz, despite all those high rises, is slowly declining, propped up partly by momentum and partly because the city is home to both the national legislature and the executive branch.  The judiciary is headquartered hundreds of miles away in sensible Sucre.

I knew where to begin poking around.  After all, every town in Bolivia, even those created in the 20th century, is designed, or at least was designed at the beginning, in accordance with the Laws of the Indies.  You remember: that’s the set of ordinances, first published in 1573, that stipulated that cities in the Spanish Empire should look like Roman colonies from the time of Jesus Christ.  That’s why if you quit the booming northern periphery of Santa Cruz and seek out the city’s core, you’ll find a checkerboard-perfect street grid surrounding a central plaza with a church and government buildings.

Ditto Riberalta.  I don’t remember if the city hall there was on the plaza, but the church certainly was.  I remember it mostly because it was closed Sunday morning.  Odd, I thought, until I saw Mass conducted in the evening, when the temperature had declined to the comparatively sensible 80s.  

There was a plaza in Rurrenabaque, too, striking because at the periphery there was a large building with sailors standing with their rifles at order arms.  Bolivia hasn’t touched the Pacific Ocean since about 1880, but Bolivia still has a navy, part of which is stationed along the Beni.  It’s odd, but no odder than leading the world in Brazil nut production.

When it comes to La Paz, however, topography defeated the Laws of the Indies.  The surveyors surrendered, but not before laying out a grid of maybe five blocks by five blocks.  Each block measures about 230 feet on a side, and the streets are about 30 feet wide, so if you stand at the center of either of the intersections at the north side of the main plaza, it’s about 260 feet to the middle of the intersection to your south.  It’s also about 30 feet lower down there.  That’s an appreciable grade.  Walk from the plaza into the cathedral, which is on the south side of the plaza, and walk through the nave to the altar.  You’re now about 30 feet above the natural ground surface.  Step outside and look at the sidewall of the church.  The foundation is like a wedge of cheese, 30 feet thick under the altar and tapering to a point at the entrance.

Extensive street grids–my type specimen is Argentina’s Mar del Plata–can feel oppressive or constricting, but the grid in La Paz is too small for that.  On the other hand, though the grid was created more than 400 years ago, the buildings around it are from the 19th century or later, and they’re tedious or nondescript.  There’s a gloomy cathedral, rebuilt in the 19th and 20th centuries straight out of an architectural pattern book.  Next to it there’s an ornate neoclassical heap, the old president’s office, and on the east side of the plaza there’s another equally ornate but much larger neoclassical heap housing the Legislative Assembly.  The plaza’s north and west sides have sturdy but plain buildings, with the exception of the four-story Gran Hotel de Paris. In the 1920s it was the city’s prestige address, and it still boasts that it has  an elevator.  

Perhaps because these buildings are so unremarkable, the eye is drawn to high rises, one immediately behind the legislative assembly and other behind the old president’s office.  The first is an apartment building. The second replaces the old presidential office and comes with a rooftop heliport.  UNESCO has put Sucre and Potosí on its list of World Heritage sites, but La Paz isn’t in contention, not with the boring buildings around the plaza and not with these two eyesores standing like thugs protecting their capos.

The government makes no apologies, and I think I understand why.  I mean, apart from a few iconic images, like Washington Crossing the Delaware, Americans have pretty well forgotten their own Revolutionary War.  Bolivia’s struggle for independence, on the other hand, lasted for almost three centuries, and in the aftermath the losers didn’t even go home.  Even today, in other words, most Bolivians are primarily indigenous, but the elite is still proud of its Spanish ancestry.  The new presidential residence with its heliport  was built by the order of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and he relished sticking his finger in the eye of that precious Castilian heritage.  

I was here one year before the bicentennial of the country’s independence, but protestors were camped out, tents and all, in front of both the cathedral and the legislative assembly.  By skin color and clothing, they were obviously indigenous.  They blocked some of the doors to the cathedral with large, colorful, but folded and partly illegible banners demanding action on pensions and mining laws. I would see similar protesters around the central squares in Potosi and Santa Cruz.  A fully legible sign there read, in Spanish, “Free All Political Prisoners.”  

At least those prisoners were alive.  Down on the central plaza in Cochabamba, I would see a building prominently named Calatayud.  The name meant nothing to me, but Alejo Calatayud was  a mestizo who in 1730 heard that the Spanish had decided to tax mestizos at the same punitive rate that they taxed Indians.  On the face of it, Calatayud wasn’t a natural ally of Indians, but they joined hands with him to protest.  The Spanish authorities responded by decapitating Calatayud.  He was 25.  

Or, if you happen to have a Bolivian banknote handy, and if it’s the one for 200 bolivianos, notice the three faces on it.  There’s Simón Bolívar on the right.  The other two are a man and his wife, both of them Indians who in 1781 led a revolt including a siege of La Paz that lasted for six months.  I don’t know what happened to the wife, but when the Spanish broke the siege the husband was drawn and quartered.  That was 50 years after Calatayud lost his head.

One of the soldiers who helped crush the siege of La Paz was a lawyer and later a mine owner.  His name was Pedro Murillo, and the main square in La Paz is named for him.  He has a statue there, too, not because he fought to lift the siege at La Paz but because he subsequently joined the rebels. “Long Live Freedom.”  Those were his words just before the Spanish hanged him in the plaza now named for him.  It’s close to Murillo’s two-story courtyard house, now a museum on Calle Jaén, a narrow lane named for another rebel the Spanish hanged. 

Even distant Santa Cruz has in its central plaza a statue of its own hero, Ignacio Warnes, who in 1816 died fighting the Spanish.  The men he commanded were so unnerved by his death in battle that they surrendered.  I don’t know what they expected, but they were summarily executed.  It does make me wonder if Patrick Henry, for all his fine words, ever seriously thought that the British might give him death. 

Simón Bolívar, the country’s first and reluctant president,  grew discouraged by what the new South American republics were doing with their independence.   He left for England but on the way there died of tuberculosis.  He was 47.  Antonio Sucre, one of his lieutenants, succeeded him as president.  Three years later, Sucre resigned.  He was subsequently shot to death by assassins.  He was 35.  I saw fine statues of him in both La Paz and in Sucre, which is named for him just as Bolivia is named for Bolívar.

On the other hand, there’s no denying that the elites have always lived splendidly, so long as they behaved. Perhaps not as splendidly now as in the past–the museum in Murillo’s house displays an intricately ornamented powder horn made of silver and suspended by elaborate silver chains from a silver-trimmed saddle–but I remember a couple of houses in Riberalta. A rubber boom there about 1900 made a few people rich enough for one baron to build a duplicate of the Parthenon, with a copy of Michelangelo’s Moses up top.  Moses gazes toward a rendition of the Taj Mahal.  I’m not kidding.  There’s a sphinx, too, and stone lions.  In a newer part of town, a banker makes do with a modern house, two-story, stylishly white with lots of glass, like something you might find for several million dollars in San Diego.  The house is protected by electric fencing.

Most Bolivians with money say that Cochabamba is the best place to live in Bolivia. Nice climate, good restaurants.  The northern side of town has homes that look as though they could have been built in the 1920s in California’s Monterey or Santa Barbara. I stayed at a hotel converted from one of those homes.  Its public rooms were so spacious that sinking into one of the comfortable sofas I began to feel like an aristocrat myself. 

The hotel was near the mansion built in the 1920s for Simon Patino.  Bolivia had moved on from silver to tin, and Patino, originally a poor man, became the world’s tin king, living much of his life in Europe but planning to retire to Cochabamba.  

Patino’s place reminds me of San Simeon.  Perhaps it was the marble nymphs scattered here and there or the magnificent billiard table housed in a room gorgeously modeled on the Alhambra.  Nothing but the best, or at least the most expensive, but fate plays tricks, and Patino died in Argentina without ever living in the mansion.  He had a playboy son and a grandson who died very young, but neither of them lived in Bolivia.

For opulence grander than this, I turn to an oil painting by Melchior Perez de Holguin.  I haven’t seen it–it’s in Spain, measures 19 feet across, and doesn’t travel much–but there are lots of reproductions.  

The subject is the entrance to Potosí in 1716 of a viceroy named Diego Morcillo.  He concurrently held the position of Archbishop, but, like the big boss who carries no keys, Morcillo is wrapped in a gray cloak and wears a gray hat.  Don’t let it fool you.  He rides a horse surrounded by nine men on foot. They are dressed in flamboyant red and carry poles supporting a canopy to shade the great man.  He and they are preceded by a company of foot soldiers and followed by others on horseback.  

PotosÍ and in particular the Cerro Rico had by the time of this painting been making the Spanish Crown rich for 150 years, not because the Spanish king dirtied his precious hands but because he collected a tax of 20 percent on all the silver that hundreds of mine owners extracted or, more precisely, that hundreds of mine owners had thousands of Indians extract by forced labor.

One mine owner decided to invest part of his fortune in a valley a few miles from town.  This was and is the Cayara Valley, a bit remote today but then on the trail north to Lima.  In 1557 this ex-soldier, Don Juan de Pendones, secured from Philip II, that most mighty of Spanish kings, title to what became Peru’s first hacienda.  

(I’d better insert here a fuss-budgety detail.  De Pendones lived two centuries before Simón Bolívar and so obviously never heard of Bolivia.  Like the rest of what we think of as Bolivia, Potosí was then part of Peru.)   

So de Pendones acquired a hacienda.  It was, as I say, Peru’s first, and it’s still standing, though it’s been owned by several families over the centuries.  Most of the buildings were rebuilt in the 20th Century, but the work was done very respectfully, and the hacienda is maintained now half as museum and half as hotel, with perhaps 20 rooms.  Nothing more than two stories, nothing flashy.  The exterior walls are painted in the color we used to call Indian red. I’m not sure what we call it today.

The oldest building is a small church, complete with, under the floor in front of the altar, some of the hacienda’s owners.  Other buildings have rooms full of antiques, including bronze weights shaped like bells and once used in the Potosí mint to measure silver.  The  bells  are imprinted with a number indicating their weight not in pounds or kilograms but in marks, a unit of weight I had never heard of.  I picked up a bell labeled Mark 50, and it weighed about 20 pounds.  I left Mark 100 alone, even though the bell incorporated a thick handle.  I have no idea how much 40 pounds of silver was worth two hundred years ago, but the Potosí mint apparently handled the stuff in bulk.

The hacienda’s holdings include a spectacular library with a wall of books from the 1700s and earlier.  Many are religious, and many are bound in vellum.  They frame a doorway into a small bedroom whose central feature is an austere single bed used on a visit by Antonio Sucre.  

Two and a half centuries earlier, the viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo is said to have been dissatisfied with the accommodation available in Potosi.  Don Juan invited him to stay at the hacienda.  

This took guts. There’s a famous portrait of Toledo: thin, dark, gazing intensely at the viewer.  He’s a model of the intellectual determined to create the perfect society.  It’s no surprise that he invited the Inquisition to set up shop in Peru, which it did.  

Wanting to increase silver production, Toledo ordered the forcible resettling of Peru’s indigenous population in so-called “reductions,” new towns from which workers could be drafted to work in the mines.  He didn’t finish the job, but he made a good start.  Or a bad one, depending on who’s talking.

While staying at the hacienda, Toledo must have noticed the terraced hills on both sides of the valley.  Local Indians had built them to grow potatoes, the Andean staple.  Some of those Indians were presumably resettled on the hacienda and then ordered to work for a time in the mountain that they were the first to call “the mountain that eats men.”

Some of the survivors presumably returned to the hacienda, where I saw the valley’s bottomland carefully cultivated by workers who I’m guessing prefer not to think too much about the history of the place.   I will add that as his reward for 11 years of diligent and devoted labor, Toledo was recalled to Madrid on bogus charges of corruption.  He had made enemies, as you might expect, and they framed him. He died in a Spanish slammer at 66. 

For a couple of glorious decades Cerro Rico yielded almost pure silver.  When it ran out, mercury saved the day by allowing miners to separate the silver from the mountain’s much more abundant silver sulfide.  

Two centuries after that, with production declining again, the Spanish Crown invited a German expert to take a look.  He was Anton Helms, and he reported that operations at Potosí were “slovenly, wasteful, and unscientific.”  Perhaps he was right and I suppose that, if Potosí were discovered today, it would be exploited by a single, hyper-efficient open pit.  That’s the way Bolivia’s biggest mine today operates.  It’s a Sumitomo operation about 150 miles southwest of Potosi. Every day machines dig up 50,000 tons of rock yielding about a thousand tons of ore with economically recoverable quantities of silver, lead, and zinc.  

The king of Spain in the 16th century had no intention of waiting 500 years for monster trucks.  That’s why in 1825 an English geographer came by–good God, one of them!--and reported that, in years past, 800 mines had operated simultaneously on Cerro Rico.  The Englishman’s name was Joseph Barclay Pentland, and he reports that at the time of his visit only six mines were in operation.  Since then, things have looked up a bit. Sharron Schwartz, a British historian, reported after her visit in 2013 that about 16,000 men were working on the mountain. Most of them, she said, worked for some 200 cooperatives that rented ground from the state mining company created in 1952, when all Bolivia’s mines were nationalized.  

A few mines on Cerro Rico offer tours to visitors.  My brother has still not forgiven me for taking a pass, but I didn’t want to poop out at the bottom of a very steep and tight incline.  Now he says he wants to go, and I tell him to go: he’s 10 years younger than me, and things don’t get easier.  I also remind him that Cerro Rico is “the mountain that eats men.”

Potosí in 1600 was not only the richest but also the most populous city in South America, with a population of about 150,000.  By the late 19th century, the population had collapsed to 10,000, but since then it’s risen to an all-time high of a quarter-million.  Perhaps that’s impressive, but a quarter of a million no longer qualifies as a big city, which may be why Potosi felt to me a bit like what I imagine Vienna was like, stripped of its empire, early in the 1920s.  

Vienna has substantially recovered; Potosi, not so much.  In place of linzer torte and whipped cream, think frozen yogurt in a shop catering to tourists.  Also, a block from the plaza and up the city’s insanely busy, one-lane main street, there’s a good but touristy restaurant called Cafe 4060.  The name refers to its altitude in meters.  Go two buildings up or down the street, and that number is no longer accurate.   

Potosí does have a modern airport but there are no flights, which means that nearly every visitor drives up from Sucre, about three hours to the east. Most people take the bus, but foreign visitors support a small industry of taxi drivers who specialize in the trip, which they make at speeds suicidal for anyone who doesn’t know the road.  I spent a lot of time hanging on to the grab bar.  

Hotels are a problem, too.  Some offer courtyard character but their amenities rate 2 stars at most.  Don’t hope for a nice breakfast.  

Maybe a suppressed tourist industry is a blessing.  Nobody likes to be stared at, and for me it was great that the few tourists in town were busy touring the old mint and perhaps taking a mine tour.  They ignored what I think is the town’s treasure, the Church of La Merced, a block up from 4060.  And I do mean up.  

Forget the cathedral on the plaza.  It’s another 19th century pile, closed except on Sunday and opened during the week only for tourists willing to buy a ticket.  I was, and the guide was congenial and happy to point out the few bits of the church leftover from the original.  They include an oil picture of Saint James, Santiago Matamoros, living up to his name by slaying Muslims. In this case he leaves the dirty work to his horse, which tramples a man who lies flat and vainly holds up his arms to ward off the hooves.  The saint gazes impassively.

There was no gore at the Church of La Merced, built in the 1600s.  It was almost deserted when I saw it, despite the most extraordinary wooden ceiling I’ve ever seen, with flat planks almost hidden behind a mesh of interlocking polygons creating what seemed like a gargantuan, three-dimensional inlaid table hung face down.  This was a ceiling built for a town where money was no object and where aristocratic tastes had not been degraded the way they were by the time of Patino’s mansion–or Hearst’s at San Simeon.  

Several blocks farther up the same street–and once again I do mean up–there’s another almost ignored church.  It’s St. Martin’s, and it’s the church shown in Holguin’s 1716 painting. The outside attracts no attention, but inside both sides of the nave are covered with gilt frames around larger than life, brightly colored murals of one saint after another.   I found it more startling than the Tokyo Ginza, I suppose because you know what you’re going to find there.

For the people who live in Potosi, the order of the day isn’t discovery.  It’s patience.  Miners push rail carts filled with ore, and vendors in the old-fashioned market negotiate with customers for bread and vegetables and fruit and meat and spices. Flowers, too.  

I walked past a fine old courtyard house a couple of blocks from the plaza.  I would have ignored it, except that there were two security guards outside.  Puzzled, I looked inside and found that the place had been converted into a bank.  No surprise–banks can afford to repurpose these buildings–but the shocking thing was that the courtyard, now under a roof, had a hundred or more chairs lined up in neat rows, and every chair had somebody sitting in it, stolidly waiting, I’m guessing to inquire about a pension payment.

The central plaza has a version of the Statue of Liberty.  It’s small, perhaps 15 feet high.  It sits on a column perhaps another 15 feet high, and the column sits atop a plinth adding another ten feet.  Women were sitting all around its base.  They weren’t talking much, they were just sitting.  At the edge of the plaza opposite the cathedral, a dozen or so people were silently protesting something, and a dozen equally patient policemen stood nearby, seemingly confident that nothing was going to happen today and probably tomorrow.

Once again holding the grab bar, I returned to Sucre.  It’s listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site not because it is an old mining town–it isn’t–but because its core still looks like it did two centuries ago.  You have to overlook the intense traffic on the streets around the main plaza, but the buildings themselves look very much as they did to Bolivar and Sucre.  

There’s a wonderful central plaza, with lots of trees, lots of benches, and about as many people as can fit without making the place feel crowded.  Next to the plaza, the cathedral, like the one in Potosí, was closed on weekdays unless, once again, you were willing to buy a ticket.  I was, but I wouldn’t do it again, and I sure wouldn’t bring kids, not with the cathedral’s paintings of martyrs suffering hideous tortures.  

On the north side of the plaza, however, there’s an elegant former chapel now called the House of Independence.  It’s where Bolivia’s declaration of independence was signed in 1825, and I think it’s probably the most handsome building I saw in the whole country.  It has only two stories and its walls are painted white, but they’re trimmed with yellow stone around the windows, and they’re interrupted by unpainted wooden balconies. The central entrance, full-height, is of more yellow stone and carries the sign of the Jesuits, those letters IHS.

Sucre’s economy rests on tourists and college students.  The tourists stay close to the center, where they can stay in old courtyard houses and spend money in shops and restaurants and local transport.  Remember: there’s the long drive to Potosi, and even the town’s airport is an hour away 

The city’s students are probably more important to the city’s economy, because they include the 60,000 enrolled at St. Francis Xavier, a university older than Harvard.  The campus is scattered around the city but includes some fine old buildings close to the center.

The students support an absurd number of coffee houses with more face-to-face conversations than I think are common in the United States, where college students are the property of their phones.  The question for Bolivia’s college students is what comes after graduation.  

I spoke to one professor with four adult children.  Three of them had emigrated.  He shrugged sadly and said they were better off in Europe and North America.  I talked to a businessman in Santa Cruz who hoped that when the time came his daughters could move abroad.  More opportunity, he said.   I met a young Bolivian college graduate, fluent in German, who said that her job was working at a pre-school.  Lots of young Americans have trouble finding the careers they want, but to get ahead they don’t have to emigrate.  

I got back to Santa Cruz and checked into you-can-guess-where.  Then I took an Uber not to the farm-equipment dealers or to the Ventura mall but to the old plaza.  It was Sunday evening, and though there were lots of benches, I couldn’t find a place to sit.  Nothing special was happening, except for that protest calling for the release of political prisoners, and that protest was almost ignored.

Santa Cruz’s square is old, but like the one in La Paz, the buildings around it aren’t.  One courtyard building survives intact as a German cultural center, but next to it another has been converted to a shopping mall. On the opposite side of the square, two old buildings were demolished in the 1920s and replaced by side-by-side theaters, now themselves obsolete. The original church is gone, too, replaced by one designed by a French architect in the 19th century.  For me, the most startling thing about the church was that through a side door I spied a Starbucks.  It sold excellent fresh orange juice.

I walked a block north to the intersection of Arenales and the Avenue of September 24.  (The first name refers to a man and the second to a battle  As you can guess by now, and should, both were involved in the struggle for independence).  

To my surprise, I came upon a line of old, one-story buildings that would thrill location scouts hunting for old Mexico.  With perhaps thirty feet of street frontage, these buildings had no street-facing windows, just doors, and their walls were made of painted brick.  Gently peaked hip roofs were covered in clay tiles that extended out and over the sidewalks.  

How archaic.  How quaint.  I can’t think of a neighborhood shopping center in Oklahoma, where I live, where the architect has thought for ten seconds about shade.  Shade is obsolete if we’re outside for all of fifteen seconds while hurrying between our cars and the shop we want.

Here, however, shade mattered, which was why there were thick wooden posts at the curb. You could almost feel the weight of the clay tiles bearing down like a grand piano on its little legs.  The capitals atop the posts were carved into almost childishly simple volutes by men who hadn’t a clue about the Ionic and the Doric. For them, as the old joke goes, the Parthenon might be a nightclub.

These buildings were from before railroads, before electricity. They were from when people arrived in Santa Cruz on mules. You can bet they were for people who liked shade.  I remember now that there were benches along some of the streets even in Riberalta and Rurrenabaque. I remember having to hunt for one that was both in the shade and not already occupied.  

I have no interest in living a life as rough as the life lived by the people who built and lived in these buildings.  No indoor plumbing, no thermostat on the wall.  No antibiotics, no anesthetics.  But when I look at these buildings, the traffic on the streets is silenced, and the atmosphere feels quieter than my ever-so-hushed room at the Marriott.  

Would the Bolivian expatriates working in Toronto or Toulouse understand what I mean?  They’d likely be engrossed in technical work, probably related at this moment to the advancement of artificial intelligence.  Like the people who worked at Los Alamos 80 years ago, these people are probably having the time of their lives building something that may just be the end of us all.  Besides, they’re well paid, in least in comparison to where they came from, and money gives people a sense of security.

I ask which they’d prefer: a ride in a rocket ship or a taste of a tropical fruit they don’t know, say mangosteen.  Surely most of them will choose the rocketship.

Well, education or training or culture can shape people to want to be something they’re not, but at some point, triggered by some event, most men and women will at least momentarily want to feel the world–forgive me for this word–through the interface God gave them.  Maybe they will do it surfing. Maybe they will do it just contemplating the shade over a sleepy sidewalk.  All but the most hardened of them will get tugged this way when they have children, but it’s hard balancing the sense of being in a place where we belong with the very real need to hurry toward whatever world it is we’re chasing.

And what about the young people who stay in Bolivia–or in lots of other countries?   Along with their sisters and brothers and parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins, they may or may not wish that they could join their relatives abroad.  I think most of them would like at least a taste of life in the fast lane.  I expect most would decide that they’d prefer that life.  I also think nearly all would also wish that they had really, really long legs so they could simultaneously live in both worlds.