When Neil Armstrong visited La Paz in 1966, as part of an eleven country goodwill tour of South America, together with other famous US astronauts, armed troops lined the route from the airport to the city centre. They take security very seriously in Bolivia! As part of his trip he visited the Valley of the Moon, just 10 km south of the city and is said to have named it thus, because it looked like the moon’s surface, as seen in photographs, studied as part of his training, in preparation for the moon landing to follow. The Valley of the Moon, or La Valle de la Luna, in Spanish, is a fascinating landscape of eroded rock and clay; wind and rain, over centuries, have sculpted this landscape of gullies, stacks and ridges, forming exotic
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