Santa Cruz De La Sierra
Bolivia's poorest city for 400 years, now its richest (35% of GDP). Under 50,000 people in 1950s, now 2M+. Natural gas reserves and soy transformed the lowlands. 2008 autonomy crisis nearly split Bolivia. Growth rate: 4-5% annually.
Bolivia's richest city was its poorest for four centuries—and the reversal explains more about resource economics than any textbook. When Spain ruled, the money was in Potosí's silver mines and La Paz's administrative control. Santa Cruz sat in the eastern lowlands, cut off from the Andes by geography and ignored by colonial power. That isolation preserved something: a culture of self-reliance that became economic dynamism when the resources finally arrived.
Ñuflo de Chávez founded Santa Cruz in 1561, but the city barely grew for 400 years. As late as the 1950s, it had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants and no paved road connecting it to La Paz. The national revolution of 1952 and subsequent land reforms redistributed highland estates but paradoxically accelerated migration to the lowlands, where land was available and agricultural potential was enormous.
Natural gas changed everything. Bolivia's largest gas reserves sit in the eastern lowlands around Santa Cruz and Tarija. The gas economy (Bolivia has South America's second-largest proven reserves) funded infrastructure that finally connected Santa Cruz to the world. Soybean cultivation on cleared lowland forest added an agricultural boom. Today, Santa Cruz produces roughly 35% of Bolivia's GDP with about 30% of its population.
The political divide mirrors the geographic one. Santa Cruz's economic elite, culturally distinct from the indigenous Aymara and Quechua highland population, has pushed for regional autonomy. The 2008 autonomy crisis—when eastern departments attempted to pass their own statutes against President Evo Morales's government—was the closest Bolivia came to splitting in two.
Santa Cruz grows at 4-5% annually, transforming from a cattle town into a cosmopolitan city of over two million. Brazilian agribusiness, Mennonite farming colonies, and Argentine capital have created an economy that looks more like the Southern Cone than the Andes.
Santa Cruz proves that four centuries of poverty can reverse in a single generation—if the resources shift to your location.