Bolivia Guide
Santa Cruz and the Eastern Lowlands
Vallegrande
Some 68km west of Samaipata on the old road from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, a side road leads 53km south to VALLEGRANDE, a pleasant market town set in a broad valley at an altitude of just over 2000m. A peaceful backwater founded as a Spanish outpost in 1612, Vallegrande leapt briefly to the world's attention in 1967, when the arid region of low mountains and broken hills to the south of the town became the scene of a doomed guerrilla campaign led by the famous Argentine communist and hero of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Vallegrande served as the headquarters of the Bolivian army's successful counter-insurgency campaign; after Che was captured and executed on October 9 in the hamlet of La Higuera, about 50km to the south, his body was flown here strapped to the skids of a helicopter and put on display in the town hospital.
The centre of Vallegrande is the peaceful and spacious Plaza 26 de Enero, on the southeast side of which the municipal Casa de Cultura houses a small museum (Mon– Fri 10am– noon, 3–5pm & 7–9pm, Sat & Sun 10am– noon; $0.80). Here you can sign up for the key to visit Che's burial site and the laundry room behind the hospital for a small fee ($1.25). There's also an upstairs room dedicated to Che.
Che's former grave is on the edge of the airstrip on the outskirts of town, a short taxi ride or a ten-minute walk from the plaza. A hundred metres away behind the cemetery (and thus not on consecrated ground) you'll find the grave from which his remains and those of six other guerrillas were exhumed in 1997. The pit has been left open and is now covered with an unfinished red-tiled brick and concrete mausoleum, decorated with cheap plastic wreaths and scribbled on with tributes left by visitors; a simple wooden cross at one end bears the slogan "Por la Solidaridad, la Libertad y la Justicia" – for solidarity, liberty and justice.