La Paz

Altitude sorts everything in La Paz. Built inside a canyon gouged by the Choqueyapu River at 3,650 meters above sea level, the world's highest administrative capital stacks its 816,000 residents by elevation—wealthy neighborhoods occupy the lower, oxygen-richer valley floor while indigenous Aymara communities climb toward 4,100 meters, and the satellite city of El Alto sprawls across the altiplano rim at 4,000 meters with nearly 900,000 more. The vertical gradient maps class, ethnicity, and economic function onto physical altitude with a precision that would impress any ecologist studying altitudinal zonation.

Spanish conquistadors founded Nuestra Señora de La Paz in 1548 as a waypoint on the silver route between Potosí's mines and the Pacific coast. The city exists because of a logistics problem: someone needed to provision the mule trains carrying the wealth that financed the Spanish Empire. When tin replaced silver as Bolivia's primary export in the late 19th century, La Paz's commercial importance eclipsed Sucre's, and an 1899 political compromise split the capital—Sucre retained the judiciary and constitutional title, La Paz absorbed the executive and legislature. Two cities share one sovereignty, a constitutional arrangement that resembles the division of labor in a siphonophore, where individual polyps perform specialized functions while the colony operates as a single organism.

Three-quarters of La Paz's businesses operate informally, and over 70% of the economically active population depends on informal work. This parallel economy functions like a mycorrhizal network—decentralized, resilient to regulatory disruption, and capable of channeling resources through underground pathways that formal systems cannot detect or tax. The city's response to its canyon geography follows the same logic of niche construction: Mi Teleférico, the world's longest and highest urban cable car system, carries 200,000 passengers daily across 10 color-coded lines, turning the vertical terrain that defeats conventional transit into a commuter advantage. What took 90 minutes by road between La Paz and El Alto now takes 11 minutes by cable.

The Aymara cultural presence defines La Paz's identity. Cholita women in bowler hats and layered pollera skirts, once banned from restaurants and cinemas through the 1980s, now anchor the city's cultural economy. The Witches' Market sells dried llama fetuses and medicinal herbs alongside tourist souvenirs—a commercial ecosystem where indigenous knowledge systems generate economic value on terms that formal markets never designed. Bolivia's 2024 census counted fewer El Alto residents than projected, suggesting the altiplano growth engine may be cooling. With international reserves down to $1.98 billion and political uncertainty ahead of the August 2025 elections, La Paz's informal networks face their most severe stress test since the economic reforms of the 1980s.