Sucre - A beauty

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The 14 hour public bus ride was pretty tortuous and increadibly bumpy. Bolivia is a very poor country and there aren´t that many sealed roads outside the centre of most towns. Instead pot-holed dust tracks are the norm and the busses hurtle down them as if they were the M25.

Bolivia is a big country (I am told almost as big as >France and Spain put together but I need to check that) with a population of only nine million. Half is tropical jungle & savannah, and the other half, the altoplano, is up high in the Andes mountain range where it is in the most and barren. Its fiercely cold at night (well below freezing) and hot in the daytime (say up to 25 degrees). There isn´t a cloud in the sky and the UV is strong.

Sucre was the first town I visited in the Altoplano. On the bus trip I went from 450 meters at Santa Cruz to 2700m in Sucre and I could really feel the lower amount of oxygen in the air. The mountain ranges are vast. Beautiful and barren at the same time. The feeling of space is immense. On he other hand the hair pin turns on the mountain sides that my bus was going around was disturbing and I am quite pleased that for most of the journey it was dark. When higer up you notice a greater proportion of indigenous people, many of the Chequens. the women in particular wear quite unusual outfits.

Sucre is a beautiful city. Set in a basin, surrounded by barren brown mountains, its amazing to think that such an important city (historically speaking) could be so remote. The buildings are all white and most have decorative terracotta coloured roofs. The central plaza is stunning. Many of the buildings are colonial looking, and you can feel the history as you walk around. At the same time there is the hustle and bustle of a key city and the obvious poverty that many are so used to. There´s no shortage of shoe shine boys in the central plaza!

The Bolivians enjoy a good protest. If fact there were two in the centre of Sucre the day I was there. The morning protest regarded miners rights, and the afternoon protest was about the proposed re-writing of the Bolivian constitution! There were a few thousand people marching in the streets letting off bangers - and the miners even let off a bit of dynamite to ensure their voices were heard!!

Sucre was formerly the capital of Bolivia and is still the judicial capital. However, La Paz has taken over as the govenmental capital, and is internationally regarded as the capital.

The city was founded in about 1545 by the Spanish conquistadors and became one of the most important cities in the South America under Spanish rule. Whilst the war of independence from Spain was the first in S America, beginning in 1809, Bolivia was the last to get independence in 1825. Largely due to the fact that Bolivian silver funded a substantial portion of the Spanish Empire.

I spent much of the day seeing the sights with a guy from England who was the only other Gringo (local expression used to describe western travellers!) on the bus.

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