La Paz was founded in 1548 on the silver route from Potosí, built inside a canyon so the Spanish could escape the Altiplano wind. Its history is written in Baroque church façades, Aymara rebellion sieges and a presidential palace scarred by coups.
Bolivia's archaeology museum on Calle Tiwanaku holds monoliths, ceramics and textiles from the Tiwanaku empire (c. 500–1000 AD), plus Inca and Amazonian collections. Housed in a 1920s neo-Tiwanaku building. Open Tue–Fri 09:00–12:30 and 15:00–19:00.
The current church dates from 1743–1790 after the 1610 snowfall collapsed the original 1548 foundation. Its mestizo-Baroque façade carves Andean masks, harpies and chirimoya fruit into stone. The convent museum includes the choir, crypt and bell towers.
The best-preserved colonial street in La Paz, a single cobbled block of 18th-century houses now holding four museums: Museo Costumbrista, Museo del Litoral, Museo de Metales Preciosos and Casa de Murillo, home of independence martyr Pedro Domingo Murillo.
Inside Calle Jaén 777, three vaulted rooms display pre-Columbian goldwork, Tiwanaku silver plaques and ceremonial pieces recovered from Lake Titicaca, alongside the metallurgical techniques Andean smiths used centuries before European contact.
Bolivia's political heart, named for Pedro Domingo Murillo, hanged here in 1810. The Palacio Quemado ('Burned Palace') earned its name in the 1875 fire; from the lamppost on the plaza, President Gualberto Villarroel was lynched by a mob in July 1946.
Begun in 1835 and only consecrated in 1925, the neoclassical cathedral on Plaza Murillo took ninety years to build on a slope requiring 12-metre foundations. Its stained glass depicts the Bolivian coat of arms and national history.
Set in the 18th-century palace of the Marqués de Villaverde on Calle Ingavi, MUSEF documents Bolivia's 36 indigenous nations through masks, weavings and the chullpa burial traditions of the Altiplano, tracing colonial rule's collision with Aymara culture.
In Miraflores, the monument to the president dragged from the Palacio Quemado and hanged in Plaza Murillo on 21 July 1946. His mausoleum and the surrounding plaza mark the most violent episode in 20th-century Bolivian politics before the 1952 revolution.
The pyramid-shaped mausoleum-museum commemorating the 1952 National Revolution, when armed miners overthrew the military junta, nationalised the tin mines and gave indigenous Bolivians the vote. Murals inside depict the miners' assault on La Paz.
El Alto grew from a rail-yard settlement into Bolivia's second-largest city, populated by Aymara migrants and mine workers laid off in 1985. It was the staging ground for the 2003 Gas War, when road blockades forced President Sánchez de Lozada to flee.
Aymara architect Freddy Mamani's 'New Andean' buildings — over 60 across El Alto since 2005 — fuse Tiwanaku geometry with neon colour on ballroom-and-apartment blocks, a visible statement of indigenous wealth after decades of exclusion.
The Cementerio General, laid out in 1826 just after independence, stacks niches into apartment-block walls where families leave beer and coca. The ñatitas (decorated human skulls) venerated here continue a pre-Hispanic Andean ancestor cult.