Sucre is a Sunday

---

Sucre is stuck in a time warp, actually in two time warps.

For one thing UNESCO has declared the city centre a World Heritage Site and it is now forever preserved as it was in the middle to late 19th century. This was the principal city of the Spannish colonial period and all the buildings are in typical late colonial style, white washed and on a tidy grid of quiet streets around a green Plaza de Mayor. Little in the look or feel of the city seems to have changed in the last 150 years, there is little traffic, neon signs are banned and the Plaza is kept in the beautiful yet hazey past.

The second time warp means that it is always Sunday in Sucre. The pace of life is slow in this city where the sun always shines and the Plaza de Mayor never has more than a thin sprinkling of people, lounging on the benches in the shade of tall subtropical trees. We nver felt rushed or overcome by a crowd, never deafened by the sounds of car horns and commerce and everyday seemed like the last.

Perhaps this is a little too stylised an account. It might be more accurate to say that Sucre comes into its own on a sunny Sunday afternoon. For we arrived on a warm Saturday morning after a night on the road from La Paz and checked into a large but all rather empty hostal. After much needed showers and changes of clothes we walked out onto what is actually a failry busy street, opposite the central market. The central market and the streets that hedge around it are busy but even here there was a feel of if not lethargy, a real sense of contentment with a moderately paced life.

We spent days wandering the streets, visting mueseums and generally relaxing. We visited a local supermarket and bought beer and snacks which we consumed at a lesurely pace on the roof terrace of the hostal as the sun set over the red roof tiles and behind the close-by mountains. The calm and quiet was breifly interrupted in the most anitque way by the march of a local school band.

The only excursion we made of any real note was to what is comically called Crataious Park, home to the wolrd´s largets collection of dinosuar footprints. These footprints were uncovered in the 1980s by workers of the huge cement works, which owned the land. These prints now stride across a vertical cliff face that 200 million years ago was a muddy lake side. Although interesting it can´t hold your attention for too long and since 2005 a consortium that includes the Inter-American Development Bank and the Cement Works opened a fun-for-all-the-family park. This is complete with visitors centre, landscaped walkways up to a viewing platform and best of all... life size models of dinosaurs! Eddie and I spent a good 30 minutes being 10 years old again, taking pictures of each other in the presance of T-Rex and company.

After four days we realised that we would have to leave Sucre and its lazy afternoons in order to get on with our journey. We caught the bus back onto the Altiplano, heading for the world´s highest city, Potosi.

---

Photos

Dino Footprints
Really they are!

Plaza de Mayor
Sunday

Comments

[Laura]

It would be nice if it was always Sunday everywhere- huge meals and no work!