Bolivia - The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget - page 161

a new system, horario continuo , whereby
they work Monday to Friday straight
through from 8.30am to 4pm without
closing for lunch.
Bank opening hours are generally
Monday to Friday from 8.30am to noon
and 2.30pm to 6pm; some branches are
also open on Saturdays from 9am until
noon. ENTEL telephone offices usually
open daily from around 8am to 8pm,
sometimes later.
Bolivians welcome any excuse for
a party, and the country enjoys a huge
number of national, regional and local
fiestas , often involving lengthy
preparation and substantial expense.

continuation, Avenida 16 de Julio,
collectively known as El Prado . While
tiny, congested pavements and nose-
to-tail traffic make it a challenge just
to get from A to B, most visitors are
nevertheless enthralled by the energy
of La Paz's street life and the blazing
colour of its indigenous population;
once you're used to it, it's easy to explore
what is really a very compact city.
Though in general the architecture is
rather drab and functional, and most
of the surviving colonial buildings are in
a poor state of repair, their crumbling
facades and dilapidated balconies
obscured by tangled phone lines and
electric cables, there's at least one street,
Calle Jaén , where you can get a sense of
how La Paz used to look. Many of the
city's museums are also conveniently
situated here. To the west of the Prado,
lung-busting lanes sweep up to the
travellers' enclave of Calle Sagárnaga and
the Aymara bustle of Mercado Buenos
Aires beyond. To the south lies the
wealthy suburb of Sopocachi , where
you'll find some of the city's best
nightlife and restaurants. Whatever
direction you head in, the far horizon
is ever dominated by the majestic,
snow-covered, 6439m peak of Illimani.

2

La Paz
Few cities have a setting as spectacular as
LA PAZ , founded in 1548 as La Ciudad
de Nuestra Señora de la Paz - the City
of Our Lady of Peace - and now the
political and commercial hub of Bolivia.
Home to more than a million people,
and sited at over 3500m above sea level,
the sprawling city lies in a narrow,
bowl-like canyon, its centre cradling a
cluster of church spires and office blocks
themselves dwarfed by the magnificent
ice-bound peak of Mount Illimani rising
imperiously to the southeast. On either
side, the steep slopes of the valley are
covered by the ramshackle homes of the
city's poorer inhabitants, which cling
precariously to even the harshest
gradients. From the lip of the canyon,
the satellite city of El Alto sprawls in
all directions across the Altiplano,
a dirt-poor yet dynamic locus of urban
Aymara culture and protest. The fact that
its gridlocked main streets control access
to La Paz below has often been exploited
by the Aymara, with roadblocks used for
political leverage.

Plaza Murillo
Though it remains the epicentre of
Bolivia's political life, Plaza Murillo - the
main square of the colonial city centre
- has an endearingly provincial feel, busy
with people feeding pigeons and eating
ice cream in the shade.
On the south side of the plaza stand
two great symbols of political and
spiritual power in Bolivia, the Catedral
(daylight hours; free) - which, with
its rather plain facade and relatively
unadorned interior, is fairly unremarkable
- and the Palacio Presidencial
(Presidential Palace; closed to public),
with its yellow facade, thin, elegant
columns and ceremonial guards in red
nineteenth-century uniforms. On the east
side of the plaza is the Palacio Legislativo ,
the seat of the Bolivian parliament, built
in a similar Neoclassical style in the early
twentieth century.

WHAT TO SEE AND DO
There are still some fine colonial palaces
and churches in the centre, with one
of the main plazas, San Francisco ,
bisected by the frantic thoroughfare of
Avenida Mariscal Santa Cruz and its