Going Up!

La Paz is the capital. When you arrive in Sucre, they will remind you that they are (kind of) and used to be the exclusive capital of Bolivia. They very much are not. They maybe the home of the judicial branch but their days of being the center of Bolivia active is over. Santa Cruz has taken over the business center and La Paz is the center of the Bolivian government. Sucre looks like the capital. The buildings are all white-washed giving it a Spanish colonial feel.

My time in Sucre was short. I was massively running out of time and the rich city center of Sucre had little to offer my imagination. I took a little private car winding steeply up to the highest city on earth, Potosi.

Potosi is famous as the place where all of the Spanish empire's silver came from. At one time, the mines of Potosi paid off the Spanish debt and the streets were literally paved in silver. The famous book "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano tells the story of the uses of Potosi, which quickly became the most important city for the Spanish in South America. This is not a happy story though. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous and African slaves died in the mountain. The hell that Potosi represents is a dark mark in the past and one of the most telling parts of Latin American history. Now-a-days Potosi is still a working town where people wonder into the hells of the mines to see what little amounts of silver they can scrap from the mountain.