Around Cochabamba
East of Cochabamba stretches the densely-populated upper Cochabamba Valley, or Valle Alto. Set at an altitude of about 2600m, it is blessed with rich alluvial soils and a warm, spring-like climate. The valley’s fields of maize and wheat are among the most fertile and productive in the country – not for nothing is it known as the breadbasket of Bolivia. This region is dominated by peasant farmers: though still Quechua-speaking, they’re much more outward looking than the communities of the Altiplano, and played a key role in the emergence of radical peasant federations in Bolivia in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Fiesta de la Virgen de Urkupiña
Every year for three days around August 15, Quillacollo hosts the Fiesta de la Virgen de Urkupiña, which attracts up to half a million visitors and involves a massive parade of costumed dancers from all over Bolivia, as well as copious eating and drinking intertwined with sincere expressions of spiritual faith – many pilgrims walk to Quillacollo by night from Cochabamba as a sign of religious devotion. The fiesta dates back to the early nineteenth century, when a local Quechua-speaking shepherdess had repeated visions of the Virgin Mary on the nearby Cerro Cota hill. When the villagers of Quillacollo investigated, they saw a brief glimpse of the Virgin ascending to heaven, and later found a carved image of her hidden among the rocks. This was carried to the parish church of San Idelfonsino, and soon credited with numerous miracles. The name Urkupiña is derived from the Quechua for “on the mountain” – the shepherdess’s cry when she pointed out the Virgin to the villagers.
As with most major Bolivian religious fiestas, however, there’s little doubt that its true origins lie deep in the pre-Christian past. Significant pre-Hispanic burial sites have been uncovered in the centre of Quillacollo, and the town’s name means “mountain of the moon” in Quechua – the Incas considered the moon to be a major female deity, and following the Spanish conquest it was often conflated with the Virgin Mary. As well as the procession and dances, a central feature of the fiesta is a visit to the rocky outcrop where the Virgin appeared, during which tourists and pilgrims alike hack lumps of rock from the sacred mountain to take home with them in the belief that this will ensure health and material prosperity. They also make libations of coca and alcohol and burn candles, offerings associated with the Andean earth goddess Pachamama. As in the fiesta of Alasitas in La Paz, pilgrims buy miniature replicas of objects they wish to possess in the belief that by doing so the real thing will be theirs before the year is out.
The best way to visit the fiesta is as a day-trip from Cochabamba, though you’ll need to get to Quillacollo early in the morning to ensure a good spot from which to watch the dances. Accommodation in Cochabamba can be hard to find during the fiesta.
Around Sucre
The green hills and pleasant climate surrounding Sucre make this an area well worth setting aside time to explore. While the dinosaur tracks at Cal Orko and the market at Tarabuco are the most popular day-trips – and the latter will give you some sense of countryside by way of a bus window – forays by foot, mountain bike or horse will give you a much more intimate view (see Tour operators).
Tarabuco
By far the most popular excursion from Sucre is to the small rural town of TARABUCO, set amid crumpled brown mountains about 60km southeast of the city. The town itself is an unremarkable collection of red-tiled adobe houses and cobbled streets leading to a small plaza with a modern church, but its real claim to fame is its Sunday market, which acts as a focus for the indigenous communities of the surrounding mountains, the so-called Tarabuceños, who come to sell the beautiful weavings for which they’re famous throughout Bolivia. The market is a bit of a tourist trap – there are usually several busloads of foreign tourists in attendance – but it’s still principally geared towards the indigenous campesinos of the surrounding region, and the stalls selling weavings and other handicrafts to tourists are far outnumbered by those selling basic supplies such as dried foodstuffs, agricultural tools, sandals made from tyres, big bundles of coca and pure cane alcohol. If you walk a few blocks away from the centre of town you can still see campesinos engaging in trueque, a traditional Andean system of non-monetary trade in which agricultural products from different ecological zones are exchanged according to standard ratios – potatoes for maize, dried llama meat for oranges, and so on.
You can pick up some nice souvenirs at the market, though it’s best to have some idea of quality and price before you arrive (have a look at things on sale on the streets of Sucre). Small items like decorative chuspa coca-bags make good mementoes; larger items like ponchos and shawls cost a lot more. Be prepared to bargain, but not too hard: many of the sellers are poor campesinos who may be desperate to sell something so they can buy essential goods to take home to their families. Photographing people without permission is considered rude and can provoke an angry reaction: ask first, and be prepared to pay a few bolivianos for the privilege. If you want a less touristy experience, try one of Candelaria Tours’ trips to Candelaria village.
The Carnaval de Tarabuco
Every year on the third Sunday of March, Tarabuco celebrates Pujllay (or the Carnaval de Tarabuco), one of the best-known indigenous fiestas in Bolivia. Pujllay commemorates the battle of Jumbate on March 12, 1816, during the Independence War, when the Tarabuceños ambushed a battalion of marauding Spanish troops, slaughtering all but the drummer boy and eating their hearts in ritual revenge for abuses committed by the Spanish. During the fiesta, all the surrounding Tarabuceño communities come to town dressed in their finest ceremonial costumes, joined by thousands of tourists. Following a Mass to commemorate the battle, the participants stage folkloric dances and parades whilst knocking back copious amounts of chicha (fermented maize beer), beer and pure cane alcohol. The climax of the celebration takes place around a ritual altar known as a pukara, raised in honour of the Tarabuceños who died in the battle and formed from a kind of wooden ladder decorated with fruit, vegetables, flowers, bread, bottles of chicha and other agricultural produce. Drinking and dancing continues through the night: if you want to sleep, you’re better off returning to Sucre.
The Tarabuceños: master weavers
Though they wear the same traditional costume, speak the same language (Quechua) and share many cultural traditions, strictly speaking it’s not correct to refer to the Tarabuceños as an ethnic group: the name was simply given by the colonial authorities to all the indigenous communities living around Tarabuco. When the Spanish first arrived, the region had only recently been conquered by the Incas and marked the very limit of their domain. To secure the frontier and defend against raids by the indomitable Chiriguano tribes to the east, the Incas settled the area with different ethnic groups brought from elsewhere in the empire. All these indigenous communities speak Quechua, the lingua franca of the Inca empire, and at some point after the Spanish conquest they also adopted the distinctive costumes that give a semblance of unity today, but they have no collective name for themselves nor any tradition of collective political organization that suggests a common origin.
These distinctive traditional costumes make the Tarabuceños difficult to miss: the men wear leather hats, known as monteros and shaped like the steel helmets worn by the Spanish conquistadors, along with woollen ponchos woven with bright, horizontal stripes of red, yellow, orange and green on a brown background, and three-quarter-length white trousers. In addition, they often use finely woven accessories like chumpi belts and chuspa coca-bags. Though generally more muted in colour, the traditional costumes worn by the women, particularly the woollen shawls known as llijlas or aqsus, are also decorated with beautiful and complex designs, and the ceremonial hats and headdresses they wear on special occasions match the monteros of the men in their unusual shape and design: black pillboxes with a flap covering the neck decorated with sequins and bright woollen pom-poms, or boat-shaped sombreros embroidered with silver thread. More even than their costumes, however, it is Tarabuceño weavings that draw travellers to Tarabuco, and selling them has become a major source of income for the Tarabuceños, who otherwise depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and live in great poverty.
Cochabamba
At the geographical centre of Bolivia, midway between the Altiplano and the eastern lowlands, COCHABAMBA is the commercial hub of the country’s richest agricultural region, the Cochabamba Valley. With a population of more than six hundred thousand, it’s a modern, unpretentious and outward-looking commercial city. Named the “City of Eternal Spring”, it enjoys a year-round sunny climate that is matched by the warmth and openness of its population. Although most travellers who visit are just passing through, those who spend time here find Cochabamba to be Bolivia’s most welcoming city. It is also a good base for exploring the attractions of the surrounding valley – chief among these, in the eyes of the locals at least, is chicha, a thick, lightly alcoholic maize beer.
For all its charm, Cochabamba has few conventional tourist attractions, and little remains of the original colonial city centre. The Museo Archeológico is worth a visit, as is the Cristo de la Concordia, the Christ statue that overlooks Cochabamba from the east. Otherwise, the most interesting areas are the massive, rambling street markets that stretch to the south of the centre, the commercial heart of this market city.
Brief history
The Incas were quick to spot the region’s agricultural potential when they conquered it in the mid-fifteenth century, moving Quechua-speakers here to cultivate maize. Inca control of the area was ended by the Spanish, who founded the city of Cochabamba on January 1, 1574, originally naming it La Villa de Oropeza in honour of the Conde de Oropeza, father of the Viceroy Francisco Toledo, who ordered its settlement. Locals soon reverted to calling it by the indigenous place name Cochabamba, a combination of the Quechua words for lake and plain, though all but one of the shallow, swampy lakes that once stood here have now been filled in.
The Spanish established haciendas to produce grain for Potosí’s silver mines, and so important was their agricultural work to the colonial economy that the valley’s indigenous population was exempted from having to work in the mines under the mita system. When the mines went into decline towards the end of the colonial period and the early republican era, much of the hacienda land was rented out, and the region saw the emergence of a class of small but independent Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, very different in culture and outlook from the rather closed Aymara ayllus of the Altiplano. These peasant farmers played a central role in the emergence of Bolivia’s radical peasant political organizations in the 1950s and 1960s and, as migrants to the Chapare, have assumed a key role in the coca-growers’ movement of recent years.
Cochabamba and the Water War
Referred to by its inhabitants as “La Llacta”, the Quechua equivalent of the Spanish word pueblo, meaning at once city and people or nation, Cochabamba is the centre of a vigorous regional identity, and throughout Bolivian history has enjoyed a reputation for political independence and rebelliousness, a tradition that continues to this day. In 2000 the city’s water system was privatized and sold to a consortium of international companies which immediately doubled or even tripled water rates. In response, Cochabamba erupted in a series of spontaneous protests that became known as La Guerra del Agua – “the Water War”. Thousands of citizens from all social classes took to the streets to demand rates be lowered, blocking roads in and out of the city. The Banzer government responded in familiar fashion: a state of siege was declared, protest organizers were arrested, armed troops were sent in and plainclothes snipers opened fire on protesters, killing one and injuring many others. Despite this oppression, the demonstrations continued, and the water consortium eventually backed down – a popular victory that was welcomed by anti-globalization campaigners around the world. The excellent 2010 film Tambien la lluvia (“Even the Rain”), starring Gael Garcia Bernal, is set during the Water War.
La Cancha
In the south of the city, an entire block between calles Tarata and Pulucayo on the east side of Avenida San Martín, is occupied by the massive covered street market known as La Cancha (“walled enclosure” in Quechua), where campesinos and merchants from throughout the region come to buy and sell their produce. Wandering through the market’s sprawling labyrinth of stalls is the best way to get a feel for the vibrant commercial culture of the city and the surrounding area: the buzz of Quechua fills the air and the traditional costumes of different campesino groups are very much in evidence, in particular the straw sombreros and bright-coloured pollera skirts of the women of the Cochabamba Valley. This is effectively one massive clearing house for agricultural produce, and the range of foodstuffs on sale reflects the full diversity of Bolivia’s different ecological zones. You’ll also find pretty much anything else poor Bolivians might need: sacks, rope, ironmongery, medicinal herbs, ritual items for making offerings to Pachamama and the mountain gods, and cheap manufactured goods. La Cancha has overflowed its original bounds, and now spreads across Avenida San Martìn onto the disused railway, and northwest to occupy another entire block between Tarata and Punata, an area now known as the Mercado Inca Llajta (“Inca Town” in Quechua).
Parque Nacional Torotoro
Some 130km south of Cochabamba, PARQUE NACIONAL TOROTORO protects a remote and sparsely inhabited stretch of the arid, scrubby landscape that is characteristic of the eastern foothills and valleys of the Andes. Covering just 164 square kilometres around the village of the same name, Torotoro is Bolivia’s smallest national park, but what it lacks in size it makes up for with its powerful scenery and varied attractions. The park encompasses a high, hanging valley and deep eroded canyons, ringed by low mountains whose twisted geological formations are strewn with fossils, dinosaur footprints and labyrinthine limestone cave complexes. In addition, the park’s woodland supports considerable wildlife – including flocks of parakeets and the rare and beautiful red-fronted macaw, found only in this particular region of Bolivia – while ancient rock paintings and pre-Inca ruins reveal a long-standing human presence. The main attractions are the limestone caves of Umajallanta, the beautiful, waterfall-filled Torotoro Canyon, and hiking expeditions to the pre-Inca ruined fortress of Llama Chaqui. Two days are generally enough to see the main attractions though it’s worth taking longer if you want to explore the area more fully.
Brief history
Though reached from Cochabamba, Parque Nacional Torotoro actually lies within Northern Potosí department. Before the Spanish conquest this was the core territory of the Charcas Confederation, a powerful collection of different ethnic groups subject to Inca rule. Following the conquest, the different Quechua- and Aymara-speaking groups that made up the confederation retained their distinct identities, each as separate ayllus (extended kinship groups, similar to clans or tribes). The ayllus of Northern Potosí mostly live in the higher-altitude lands to the west of the region, where they grow potatoes and raise livestock, but they maintain islands of territory in the dry valleys such as Torotoro, where they cultivate maize, wheat and other lower-altitude crops. This system ensures each group has access to the produce of different altitudes, and represents a distinctly Andean form of organization that has long fascinated anthropologists.
Throughout the colonial era and long after independence, Northern Potosí was the focus of frequent indigenous uprisings. As recently as 1958, during the upheaval following the 1952 revolution, Torotoro village – which was formed in the late colonial period by mestizo migrants from Cochabamba – was ransacked by armed ayllu members, who seized the lands of the haciendas that had been established on their traditional valley territories.
