Bolivia Culture & Language

Bolivian culture is overwhelmingly Andean and Indigenous, layered with a Catholic inheritance that has been absorbed rather than adopted.

Carnaval de Oruro

A UNESCO-listed procession in which some forty thousand dancers and musicians perform along a four-kilometre route for twenty hours without a break. The diablada, danced in elaborate devil masks, fuses an Andean mining cult with a Catholic morality play, and the whole thing is an act of devotion to the Virgin of the Mineshaft rather than a spectacle.

Textiles

Andean weaving here is regionally specific to the village, and a trained eye can place a piece by its pattern, palette and technique. The Jal’q’a and Tarabuco traditions around Sucre are the best known, and the museum there is the place to understand what you are looking at.

Music

Panpipes — siku and zampoña — the charango, a small stringed instrument originally made from an armadillo shell, and the quena flute. The music is played at festivals by whole communities rather than by performers.

Pachamama and the mines

Offerings to the earth mother are routine before building or travelling. In the mines of Potosí, miners leave cigarettes and alcohol for El Tío, the lord of the underground, on the grounds that Pachamama’s authority does not extend below the surface.

Food

Salteñas, juicy baked pastries eaten in the morning; silpancho and pique macho; quinoa, which comes from this altiplano; and hundreds of varieties of potato, freeze-dried into chuño by the frost and sun of the high plateau.

Spanish is the main language of government and cities, spoken by around eighty per cent of the population. The constitution recognises thirty-six Indigenous languages as official alongside it — a legal statement of intent as much as a practical one.

In practice, Quechua and Aymara are the ones you will hear, spoken by millions and, in altiplano villages and markets, often in preference to Spanish. Guaraní is spoken in the south-east.

English is not widely spoken outside tourism in La Paz, Uyuni and the Amazon lodges. Some Spanish makes an enormous difference here and Bolivian Spanish is clearly spoken and relatively easy to follow.

A few words open doors: buenos días, gracias, and in Aymara jallalla — a word of celebration and good wishes used constantly on the altiplano.