Bolivia historical timeline

Origins

Around Lake Titicaca the Tiwanaku civilisation built in cut stone on a scale nothing in the region matched, and held the high plateau for roughly five centuries before collapsing around 1000 AD. Aymara kingdoms followed, the Inca absorbed them in the fifteenth century, and the Spanish arrived in the 1530s. The Aymara and Quechua languages outlasted all of it and are still spoken by millions.

Turning points

In 1545 silver was found in the mountain above Potosí, and within decades the town was among the largest cities on earth. Its ore paid for the Spanish empire and was dug under the mita, a rotating forced-labour draft whose death toll was immense; the phrase vale un Potosí entered Spanish as a synonym for unimaginable wealth. Independence came in 1825 and the country took Simón Bolívar’s name. Two wars then took territory: the War of the Pacific in 1879 removed the entire coastline and left Bolivia landlocked, and the Chaco Boreal War with Paraguay in the 1930s cost more ground. The National Revolution of 1952 brought universal suffrage, land reform and nationalised mines. In 2005 Evo Morales became the first Indigenous president, and a new constitution in 2009 redefined the country as plurinational.

Influential people

Túpac Katari, who besieged La Paz in 1781 and whose last words — that he would return as millions — are still quoted in politics. Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre. Víctor Paz Estenssoro, architect of 1952. Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, who organised the mining camps’ women and took their case to the United Nations. And Evo Morales, whose fourteen years and contested departure in 2019 still divide the country.

Cultural evolution

Thirty-six Indigenous languages have official status. The Carnaval de Oruro, a UNESCO-listed procession in which dancers perform the diablada for twenty hours through the streets, fuses Andean ritual with Catholic pageant and is the largest event in the country. The coca leaf is legal, chewed daily and defended as cultural rather than narcotic. And the cholitas — Aymara women in bowler hat and layered skirt — went in two generations from a marked underclass to a political and commercial presence, wrestling included.

Present-day significance

The Salar de Uyuni holds one of the largest lithium resources on earth, which ties a poor, landlocked country to the battery supply chain. Natural gas has carried the budget and is declining. La Paz and El Alto are joined by the world’s longest urban cable-car network, built because the terrain leaves no alternative. Bolivia has never dropped the claim to the sea it lost in 1879, and still maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca.