Set among the steamy, tropical lowlands just beyond the last Andean foothills, SANTA CRUZ is Bolivia’s economic powerhouse. An isolated frontier town until the middle of the twentieth century, the city has since become the biggest in the country, a sprawling metropolis with a booming oil, gas, timber, cattle and agro-industry economy. This rapid growth – and the availability of land – has attracted a diverse range of immigrants to Santa Cruz, including Japanese rice farmers, German-speaking Mennonites and, far poorer, indigenous migrants from the Andes.
Native Cruceños, however, still dominate the city. Known as cambas, they are culturally a world apart from the rest of Bolivia (they in turn refer with mild contempt to the highland immigrants as collas – the two terms being old Inca words for lowland and highland peoples respectively). Generally loud, brash and happy-go-lucky, their language, music and outlook are infused with a tropical ease and sensuality, which feels closer in spirit to Brazil or Colombia. Santa Cruz has few conventional tourist attractions, and some find its brash commercialism and pseudo-Americanism unappealing. However, others enjoy its dynamism and tropical insouciance.
The city continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, spreading inexorably in a mixture of ragged shantytowns, commercial developments and exclusive residential districts where oil executives, businessmen and made-good drug-traffickers relax in opulent mansions and drive around in imported 4WDs (known as “narcocruisers”). The old colonial city centre, however, is still dominated by whitewashed houses with tiled roofs that extend over the pavements, and when everything closes up in the middle of the day for an extended lunch break the city is suffused with a languid tropical indolence.