La Paz Department
La Paz Department hosts the world's highest capital at 3,640m, where altitude shapes both human physiology and political dynamics as power flows inward from resource-rich regions.
La Paz Department contains Bolivia's seat of government at 3,640 meters elevation, making it the world's highest administrative capital. The city of La Paz fills a canyon in the Altiplano, its geography creating microclimates where wealthier residents live lower (warmer) while poorer neighborhoods climb higher. The adjacent city of El Alto—which sits on the plateau rim at 4,150 meters—has grown to over 900,000 residents and staged its own water war in 2005 that reinforced the political shifts begun in Cochabamba.
The department functions as Bolivia's political nervous system, concentrating bureaucratic employment and protest movements that have toppled multiple governments. Miners from state-owned companies march to La Paz to demonstrate against reforms, as they did in late 2025 when incoming president Rodrigo Paz removed fuel subsidies. This concentration creates classic source-sink dynamics: political power flows inward from the departments, decisions flow outward to govern resource-rich regions whose populations resent central control.
La Paz demonstrates how altitude shapes human adaptation. The Andean highlanders who populate the department have evolved physiological differences from lowland populations, including larger lung capacity and higher hemoglobin levels. This biological adaptation parallels institutional adaptation: the government that operates at extreme elevation has developed distinctive patterns of coalition-building, clientelism, and crisis management shaped by Bolivia's fragmented geography and ethnic diversity.