58 Fun Facts About Bolivia

Which of Bolivia's two capitals is the constitutional capital and seat of the judiciary?

Sucre kept the title and the supreme court as a compromise after an 1898 bid to move the capital to La Paz set off a civil war; the president and congress went to La Paz.

La Paz holds which distinction among the world's capital cities?

Highest administrative capital on Earth, yet La Paz was built low for its setting: the centre lies in a deep canyon below the surrounding plateau, which shelters it from the cold highland winds.

Which is the largest city in Bolivia, located in the eastern tropical lowlands?

Santa Cruz was a small outpost town for most of its history, then grew so fast on farming and natural gas that it overtook La Paz around the turn of the 21st century.

In 2001 La Paz began sending young people into traffic dressed as which animal?

Zebras were chosen because a striped crosswalk is a 'paso de cebra' in Spanish; the costumed helpers are at-risk young people hired by the city, and other Bolivian cities copied the idea.

Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia is the world's largest what?

Salt flat is what was left when a vast prehistoric lake dried up; after rain a thin film of water turns the whole plain into a giant mirror of the sky.

Salar de Uyuni is so level and so vast that scientists use it for what purpose?

Calibrating satellite altimeters: once this plain of more than 10,000 square kilometres, one of the most level places on Earth, had been mapped by GPS, satellites passing overhead could check their height readings against it.

Titicaca, shared by Bolivia and Peru, is often described as the world's highest what?

Navigable lake: its first steamer was built in England in 1862, then carried up the Andes in pieces on the backs of mules and put together on the shore.

In Inca belief, which deity first rose from a sacred rock on an island in Lake Titicaca?

The sun god's rock stands on Isla del Sol, the Island of the Sun, and Inca rulers, who claimed to be his descendants, crossed the lake on pilgrimage to the temple built there.

Cerro Rico, the mountain above Potosí, was for centuries the world's greatest source of which metal?

Silver struck here in 1545 made Potosí the largest city in the New World within three decades; so many miners died inside that locals still call it 'the mountain that eats men'.

Bolivia's famously rich Potosí lent its name to San Luis Potosí, a city in which country?

Mexico's San Luis Potosí took the name once rich mines opened in the hills beside it, to compare them with the Bolivian original; in Spanish, 'un potosí' still means a fortune.

Bolivia lost its entire coastline to Chile in which 19th-century conflict?

The War of the Pacific began when Bolivia broke a promise not to raise taxes on Chilean nitrate companies; Chile landed troops at the port of Antofagasta in February 1879 and soon held the whole coast.

Despite being landlocked, Bolivia maintains what branch of its armed forces?

A navy of some 5,000 sailors in 2018, founded in the 1960s with four patrol boats from the United States, chases smugglers and drug traffickers along the Amazon's tributaries.

One of Bolivia's official flags carries a large yellow star standing for what?

The nation's right to access the sea: the star stands for the coastal province lost to Chile, and every 23 March Bolivia marks the Day of the Sea with parades calling for its return.

Bolivia lost the 1932-35 Chaco War over land thought to contain what?

Oil was what both sides expected to find under the Chaco; Bolivia, with three times its enemy's population, lost most of the region yet kept its proven oilfields in the Andean foothills, which the victors never reached.

Which revolutionary was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian troops and shot the next day in October 1967?

Che Guevara's hands were cut off before his secret burial so that fingerprints could prove who he was; his remains lay hidden in Bolivia for thirty years before they were found and flown to Cuba.

Which two American outlaws are believed to have died fighting Bolivian soldiers at San Vicente?

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reportedly trapped after robbing a mine payroll; the story goes that with Sundance mortally wounded, Cassidy turned his gun on himself, though other tales bring him home alive.

Evo Morales, who led Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, was the country's first what?

Indigenous president, as he is widely regarded: he herded his family's animals as a boy in a highland village and won the 2005 election with about 54% of the vote, the first outright majority in a Bolivian election in decades.

Before politics, Evo Morales was a trade-union leader of farmers growing which crop in the Chapare?

Coca is chewed across the Andes as well as refined into cocaine; under Morales, Bolivia quit the UN drug treaty in 2012 and rejoined a year later with an exemption for the traditional chewing of the leaf.

Bolivia's 2009 constitution replaced 'Republic' in the country's official name with which term?

Plurinational State was chosen to reflect a country made up of many indigenous nations; the same charter also left Bolivia, until then officially Catholic, with no official religion.

After Spanish, which indigenous language has the most speakers in Bolivia?

Quechua was the language of the Inca Empire, which ruled western Bolivia for under a century before the Spanish came, yet it still has more Bolivian speakers than Aymara.

The Wiphala, a national symbol of Bolivia since 2009, has what design?

A chequered square of seven colours, 49 small squares in all, it was written into the 2009 constitution as a state symbol, though historians still argue over whether the design is centuries old or a 1970s creation.

Bolivia's tricolour flag has which three horizontal bands, top to bottom?

Red, yellow, green stand for the blood of the country's soldiers, its mineral wealth and its fertile land; until 1851 the same three colours flew in a different order, with yellow on top.

Bolivia's Yungas Road, once the world's most dangerous, was cut in the 1930s largely by whom?

Paraguayan prisoners of war from the Chaco War hacked it out of the mountainside, and many died doing so; in 1995 a development bank counted 200 to 300 deaths a year and called it the world's most dangerous road.

Why did traffic on Bolivia's Yungas 'Death Road' keep to the left?

So drivers could see the cliff edge: keeping left put the driver's seat right above the drop, on a dirt track only about three metres wide with falls of up to 600 metres.

Which pre-Columbian civilisation near Lake Titicaca collapsed around AD 1000?

Tiwanaku turned marshy lakeshore into raised fields to feed its capital, until a run of droughts around the turn of the millennium helped bring the whole system down.

Nevado Sajama, Bolivia's highest peak at 6,542 m, is what kind of mountain?

An extinct volcano with a flat, snow-covered summit: in 2001 a team of villagers and a team of mountain guides climbed it and played a football match on top, to show that sport is possible at such heights.

Which snowcapped peak, more than 6,400 m high, looms over La Paz as the backdrop to the city?

Illimani was hit near its summit by an Eastern Air Lines jet on New Year's Day 1985; the wreck lay so high that no bodies or flight-recorder parts were found for three decades, feeding conspiracy theories.

As of 2019, La Paz's Mi Teleférico held which world record?

Longest aerial cable-car system: La Paz sits in a canyon some 400 m below its neighbour El Alto, and the winding roads between them were so clogged that from 2014 commuters were lifted over them instead.

Bolivia altered the clock on its congress building in 2014 to honour the southern hemisphere by doing what?

Run anticlockwise: the numerals were reversed too, since a sundial's shadow turns that way south of the equator, and the foreign minister who unveiled this 'clock of the south' already wore a wristwatch to match.

At La Paz's Witches' Market, the dried foetuses of which animal are sold as offerings to Mother Earth?

Llama foetuses, called sullus, are burned in offerings to Pachamama or buried under the foundations of new buildings to ask her protection for the house and the workers building it.

The leading dance of Bolivia's Oruro Carnival features performers masked as what?

Devils took over a dance that began as a rite to the Uru god Tiw: when Spain banned the old ceremonies in the 1600s they carried on under cover of a Christian feast, with the Andean gods hidden behind the saints.

What sets a salteña, the baked Bolivian pastry, apart from an ordinary empanada?

A soupy stew filling: cooks stir gelatin into the stew so that it goes into the pastry solid, then melts in the oven into hot broth sealed inside the crust.

Andean farmers have long freeze-dried which crop, using frosty nights and their own feet, to make chuño?

Potatoes are frozen on winter nights and trampled underfoot to press out the water, leaving chuño that weighs about a fifth as much and can be stored for years.

Ekeko, the god of abundance at La Paz's Alasitas fair, is traditionally loaded with what?

Miniature goods people wish to acquire, from tiny houses and cars to suitcases of toy banknotes, are bought at the fair, blessed, and offered to Ekeko in the hope the real thing follows within the year.

Which South American football giant did Bolivia thrash 6-1 in a 2009 World Cup qualifier?

Argentina's coach was Diego Maradona, who a year earlier had backed Bolivia's campaign to keep hosting internationals that FIFA wanted moved; after the rout he said every Bolivian goal was 'a stab in my heart'.

As of 2024, Bolivia was the only South American country never to have done what?

Won an Olympic medal: Bolivia sent a lone swimmer to Berlin in 1936 and has even entered skiers in the Winter Games, but its only Olympic gold is the one its under-15 footballers won at the first Youth Olympics in 2010.

Cochabamba's Cristo de la Concordia, completed in 1994, took the title of largest statue of Christ from which rival?

Christ the Redeemer in Rio had held the record since 1931; Cochabamba's builders copied its outstretched arms, made their figure a few metres taller, and let visitors climb stairs inside it up to those arms.

Bolivia's 1987 currency reform introduced the boliviano at what exchange rate to the old peso?

One to a million: the peso had held at 20 to the US dollar through the 1970s, but hyperinflation drove it past 1.5 million by 1985, so the new boliviano simply dropped six zeros.

Bolivia's 1952 National Revolution nationalised which industry, then the country's main source of wealth?

Tin mining had made three magnates, led by Simón Patiño, who rose from mine apprentice to control half the country's output; within months the revolution seized their companies and gave every adult the vote.

Which indigenous rebel leader laid siege to La Paz in 1781 before the Spanish captured and executed him?

Túpac Katari was born Julián Apaza and built his rebel name from two martyred leaders, Túpac Amaru and Tomás Katari, before surrounding the city for more than a hundred days.

Bolivia's independence struggle began with an uprising on 25 May 1809 in Sucre, then known by which name?

Chuquisaca rose after Napoleon toppled Spain's king and left the colony unsure whom to obey; the revolt was soon put down, yet Bolivians remember it as Latin America's 'first cry of freedom'.

Bolivia's Madidi National Park is famed for what?

Exceptional biodiversity: the park drops from high Andean peaks to lowland rainforest, and when a new monkey was found here the right to name it was auctioned to fund the park, which is why it honours an online casino.

Explorer Percy Fawcett's reports of a remote Bolivian plateau are said to have helped inspire which adventure novel?

The Lost World was written by Fawcett's friend Arthur Conan Doyle after the explorer surveyed the Huanchaca tableland in 1908; its habitats really have been cut off for millions of years, and UNESCO now lists the park around it.

Bolivia's Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos taught indigenous converts what as a means of conversion?

European music outlasted the missionaries: when Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767 most of their South American missions fell into ruin, but these six towns lived on, and their churches host regular music festivals.

Which animals left the thousands of footprints that climb a near-vertical rock wall at Cal Orck'o in Bolivia?

Dinosaurs walked there when it was level ground beside a lake; movements of the Earth's crust later tipped the rock on end, so about 12,000 footprints now appear to march straight up a wall.

Which South American plateau stretches from southern Peru across western Bolivia?

The Altiplano held Bolivia's second-largest lake, Poopó, until drought and water diversion dried it up at the end of 2015, wiping out the fishing that the villages on its shore had lived on.

Which country is the only landlocked nation in the Americas besides Bolivia?

Paraguay has a river road to the sea: ships run down the Paraguay and Paraná rivers to the Atlantic, an outlet Bolivia long sought and won only a corridor to.

Which German dialect is spoken by some 70,000 Mennonites in Bolivia's Santa Cruz?

Portuguese is also spoken along the Brazilian border.

Bolivia's first Pan American Games gold medal, won in 2019, came in which court sport?

Racquetball's men's team beat Colombia in the Lima final for the first Pan American title in Bolivia's history; nearly all of the country's other medals at those Games have come from the same sport.

Which birds flock in vast numbers to Laguna Colorada, a shallow red lake high in Bolivia's Andes?

Flamingos nest on the lake, Andean and James's flamingos among them; its red-brown colour comes largely from algae that thrive in the salty water, and it deepens or fades as the temperature changes.

In 2008 Evo Morales declared Bolivia free of what, after a campaign designed by Cuba?

Illiteracy was declared beaten after a mass literacy drive run with Cuban and Venezuelan help; the claim rests on a UNESCO yardstick under which a country qualifies once almost all its adults can read and write.

What was Bolivia's first official name when it became independent in 1825?

Republic of Bolívar was chosen partly to win over Simón Bolívar, who doubted that Upper Peru should be a separate country at all; he accepted the honour but handed its presidency to his leading general.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni sits on one of the world's largest deposits of which metal?

Lithium has to be pumped from wells and left for months in evaporation ponds, and Bolivia was slow to start: unlike two of its neighbours, it was still not among the world's main producers in 2019.

Which Bolivian president faced down General Juan José Zúñiga in person during a failed coup in June 2024?

Luis Arce confronted the general inside the presidential palace and ordered him to stand his troops down; within hours the soldiers had left and police had arrested Zúñiga.

Bolivia's vanished Chacaltaya glacier once held the world's highest what?

Ski run: skiers came from around the world to say they had skied at 5,300 m. Scientists expected the glacier, thought to be 18,000 years old, to last until 2015, but it had melted away by 2009.

Who won Bolivia's 2025 presidential run-off, ending two decades of MAS dominance?

Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, upset the polls to top the first round, then beat former president Jorge Quiroga in the run-off and took office that November.

Bolivia gave up its Acre territory in 1903 after settlers flooded in to harvest which Amazon product?

Rubber: thousands of tappers crossed into remote Acre and rebelled, and under the Treaty of Petrópolis Bolivia traded a frontier it could barely reach for cash and a promised railway.

The UN named 2013 the International Year of which Andean 'superfood', grown in Bolivia for thousands of years?

Quinoa was a staple around Lake Titicaca long before the Incas; when health-food shoppers abroad discovered it, the price tripled between 2006 and 2013.