Home › Countries › South America
Bolivia
The high heart of South America
Bolivia is the rooftop of South America, a landlocked country where the Andes split into two great cordilleras and cradle the Altiplano, a windswept high plateau where most Bolivians live above 3,500 meters. It holds two capitals, the constitutional seat at Sucre and the de facto government in La Paz, the highest such city in the world. From the silver mountain of Potosi that once bankrolled the Spanish empire to the blinding white expanse of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, Bolivia is a country of extremes and of the most strongly Indigenous population on the continent.
The western third of Bolivia is dominated by the Altiplano, ringed by snowcapped peaks including Nevado Sajama at 6,542 meters and bordered to the north by Lake Titicaca, the highest large navigable lake on Earth. East and north of the mountains the land drops sharply into the Yungas valleys and then the lowland plains and tropical forests of the Amazon and Gran Chaco basins, which cover most of the country's territory but hold a minority of its people. This vertical geography gives Bolivia climates from alpine cold to humid tropical heat within a few hundred kilometers.
The Aymara and Quechua civilizations long predate the Inca, who absorbed the region before the Spanish conquest turned Potosi into a silver engine for global trade. Independence came in 1825, and the country took its name from Simon Bolivar. Bolivia later lost its Pacific coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific, a wound still felt in national politics. In recent decades it reasserted its Indigenous identity, adopting a plurinational constitution and recognizing dozens of official languages alongside Spanish.