Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing right brings you to the site's main complex of Inca buildings. Passing the foundations of
several ruined buildings, you emerge on a broad plaza measuring about 100m by 150m and
flanked on three sides by partially overgrown Inca ruins of which only low walls or founda-
tions now remain.
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE: EL FUERTE
By taxi
The easiest way to reach El Fuerte is by taking a taxi from Samaipata (about Bs40
one-way, or Bs70 return with an hour's waiting time) or going on a guided tour, many of
which involve beautiful treks.
By foot
You can walk to the ruins in about two hours - follow the road out of Samaipata to-
wards Santa Cruz for a few kilometres, then turn right up the marked side road that climbs to
the site; note that it's an uphill slog on the way there, though significantly easier on the way
back.
Vallegrande
Some 68km southwest 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. The town's main attraction is the erstwhile grave of
Ernesto
“Che” Guevara
, which attracts a steady trickle of pilgrims.
Brief history
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 hero of the Cuban
revolution,
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
.
Vallegrande served as the headquarters of the Bolivi-
an 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.
What happened next remained a closely guarded secret for the next 28 years, until the
Bolivian general Mario Vargas Salinas revealed that
Che's body
- minus his hands, which
were amputated for identification purposes - had been buried by night in an unmarked pit
near the
airstrip
on the edge of town, to prevent his grave from becoming a place of pilgrim-
age. After a year and a half of investigation, in 1997 his remains, along with those of several
of his guerrilla comrades, were found by a team of Cuban and Argentine forensic scientists
and flown to Cuba, where they were re-interred in a specially built mausoleum on the out-
skirts of the city of
Santa Clara
, the scene of his greatest victory in the Cuban revolutionary
war.
