La Paz
Brief history
Founded in 1548 by Spanish conquistadores looking for gold, *La Paz* swiftly became a thriving economic centre with merchants from all over heading here to trade in coca, tin, silver and gold, and facilitating routes from coast to Andes and onward to [Buenos Aires]. Within a century, the city was inhabited by a few hundred Spaniards and quite a few thousand indigenous Bolivians, each fraction taking up opposite shores of the Choqueyapu River. Although several Indio rebellions initiated here, each was met with tough and brutal resistance from the occupiers, and it wasn’t until 1825 that independence from the Spanish Crown was finally achieved. By then, *La Paz* was the most prominent and largest of all the cities, and even though *Sucre* remained the official capital, *La Paz* was, and still remains, home of the President and Government.
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The mass migration of farmers to the city has spawned quite a few shanty suburbs. Poverty here, and the disparity between haves and have nots, are a little hard to ignore. Nowadays, if there’s a protest, it’s much more likely that it will be staged in *La Paz* rather than