Start high and come down. Ride the Red Line up to El Alto on the first clear morning you get, then work the Casco Viejo on foot: San Francisco, the amulet stalls on Linares, and the ethnography museum on Ingavi. Give the second day to the geology, either the Valle de la Luna or the old Yungas road. Keep a Thursday or Sunday for the Feria 16 de Julio, and take the first day slowly.
La Paz is built inside a canyon, and that single fact explains the city. The centre sits at about 3,640 metres in a bowl gouged out of the altiplano, the wealthier districts run downhill, and El Alto spreads across the rim above. Nothing here is flat, which is why the city answered its transport problem with cable cars rather than a metro.
This is public transport that behaves like an observation deck. Ten colour-coded lines climb out of the bowl and over the rim, and the Red Line is the one to ride: from the centre to El Alto in under fifteen minutes with the city stacked beneath the cabin and Illimani on the skyline. It runs early, it runs late, and it is cheap.
Ten kilometres south of the centre the clay hillsides have eroded into a field of pale spires and gullies, crossed by two marked circuits. It is geology rather than scenery: the soft rock here is mostly clay and gravel, and the towers are what is left after the rain took the rest. The valley floor is lower and warmer than the city.
Two steep lanes above the San Francisco church hold the Witches' Market, where Aymara yatiri sell dried herbs, amulets and the llama foetuses still buried under new buildings as an offering to the Pachamama. It is a working supply trade rather than a curiosity. Sagárnaga alongside is the alpaca and trekking strip.
The one museum to keep if you only keep one. It occupies an 18th-century colonial house on Ingavi and reads the country through what people made and wore: ceremonial masks by region, Andean weaving with the iconography explained, and rooms on the lowlands most visitors never look for.
The route sold as the Death Road is a single-lane gravel shelf cut into the mountainside, with no barrier and a long drop. Traffic moved to a paved bypass in 2006, so what is left is a descent of roughly 3,500 metres into subtropical forest, done on a mountain bike over most of a day. The operator matters more than the price.
The facade is the clearest piece of mestizo baroque in the city, carved with Andean birds, masks and fruit by indigenous hands working to a Spanish plan. The church went up through the 18th century after the first collapsed under snow in 1610, and the cultural centre inside opens the cloisters, the choir and the roof.
Bolivia's political square, named after Pedro Domingo Murillo, who led the 1809 uprising and was hanged on it. Three sides are the cathedral, the old presidential palace and the Legislative Palace, whose clock was reversed in 2014 so its hands turn the way a southern-hemisphere shadow does.
Lucha libre in which the headline fighters are Aymara women in full pollera skirts, shawls and bowler hats, throwing each other around a ring to a crowd that is half local families and half visitors. It started in El Alto in the early 2000s and it is theatre rather than sport: staged, funny and pointed.
Twice a week El Alto turns a district into one of the largest street markets on the continent. Thursday and Sunday, the grid around Plaza 16 de Julio fills with car parts, tools, secondhand clothes, phones, furniture and food over several square kilometres. Nothing about it is arranged for visitors.
A spur of rock north of the centre with an almost complete circle of city underneath it, from the red-brick slopes climbing towards El Alto to Illimani closing the southern end. It is free, it is a local evening spot rather than a tour stop, and it gives you the shape of the bowl in a way no photograph from street level manages.
The daily produce market, spilling downhill along Calle Rodríguez: altiplano potatoes by the dozen variety, fruit from the Yungas, lake fish.
A multi-storey food hall beside Plaza Pérez Velasco, and the cheapest sit-down lunch in the centre. Api and pastel in the morning.
The covered market on Avenida Camacho, rebuilt and tidier than most, with lunch counters upstairs where office workers eat.
Herbs, amulets, incense and offerings for the Pachamama, sold on Linares and Melchor Jiménez by vendors who supply households rather than tourists.
El Alto's twice-weekly street fair, Thursdays and Sundays, running for square kilometres. No concession to visitors.
More than two thousand instruments assembled by the charango player Ernesto Cavour, with charangos made from armadillo shells and a room where you are allowed to play.
Pre-Columbian gold, silver and copper work, including Tiwanaku pieces, in one of the colonial houses on the cobbled Calle Jaén.
Ceramic dioramas of old La Paz, from public hangings to carnival, and where the shared Calle Jaén ticket is sold. It covers three houses.
A small, dense museum on Calle Linares that takes the leaf seriously: its place in Andean ritual and labour, the chemistry, the trade, and the politics that follow it.
Bolivia's first plant-based fine-dining room, in the old town. The name means plant universe in Aymara, and the pre-Hispanic diet was largely vegetable anyway.
A short daily set menu of Bolivian home cooking, served at lunch only in a small room. Arrive early or expect the queue.
Aymara for kitchen, and a menu built on ancestral technique: fermentation, earth ovens, altiplano grains and tubers, plated for a modern dining room in the southern zone.
Chef Gabriela Prudencio's small pasta room in Sopocachi, unfussy and consistently full. Order the carbonara and stop deliberating.
The near-complete circle: the centre below, the brick slopes climbing to El Alto, and Illimani closing the view south. A local evening spot rather than a tour stop.
A small park on a rise in Sopocachi with a chapel, gardens and benches facing Illimani. Quieter than Killi Killi and easy to reach on foot from the neighbourhood's bars.
A park on a hill above the centre, with playgrounds, a children's museum and a terrace over the Prado. The one on this list that works with a tired six-year-old.
An extinct volcanic plug at about 3,825 metres south of the city, reached on a half-day walk. Save it until you are acclimatised.
The other eroded valley, east of the city, with taller and sharper spires than the Valle de la Luna and a fraction of the visitors.
The colonial grid around Plaza Murillo and Calle Jaén: the museums, the government, the cathedral and most of the city's history inside a walkable dozen blocks.
The city's evening neighbourhood, around Avenida 20 de Octubre and Plaza Avaroa: cafes, bars, live music and embassies.
Market streets, cheap lodging and the plaza in front of the old prison. Rodríguez runs through it, which makes it the place to eat breakfast standing up.
Residential, flatter than most of the city and built around the football stadium, with the textile museum and family restaurants.
Calacoto and San Miguel, several hundred metres lower than the centre and noticeably warmer. Where the ambitious restaurants are.
A separate city on the rim at around 4,050 metres, younger and overwhelmingly Aymara, with the airport, the Feria and the cholet architecture.
Lake Titicaca in a long day or, better, an overnight. Three and a half hours by road including the ferry, then a boat to the island's Inca paths.
A 5,421-metre peak with a road almost to the top, and the ruins of what was once the world's highest ski area. Its glacier melted out by 2009.
Two to three hours by road and about 2,000 metres lower, in warm subtropical hills of coffee and citrus. The overnight below the old road.
A 6,088-metre peak an hour from the city, climbed over two days with a guide. Often sold as an easy 6,000er, which it is not.
North over the pass beside Huayna Potosí, then a road that drops from glacier ice into cloud forest in a few dozen kilometres, past waterfalls.
A roastery and cafe in a restored house on Calle Boyacá, working with Bolivian high-altitude coffee. Sourdough sandwiches and llama charqui.
Started by four friends in 2017 and now the city's benchmark for coffee, with branches across town. Open early, which most of La Paz is not.
The rock bar Bolivian bands have played for more than twenty-five years, loud, unpolished and the most reliable live music in Sopocachi.
A small wine bar in Sopocachi with tapas and a list that takes Bolivian high-altitude wine from Tarija seriously alongside the Argentine and Chilean bottles.
The fair of the Ekeko, the Aymara god of abundance. Buyers pick up miniature houses and banknotes and have them blessed.
The city's carnival parade, with dance troupes down the Prado and water thrown from every balcony.
Processions through the old town on Good Friday, and a pilgrimage on foot to Copacabana that takes most of two days.
The city's largest festival and a UNESCO listing since 2019. Tens of thousands of dancers in costume, for a full day.
The Andean new year and winter solstice, marked at dawn at Tiwanaku, where the crowd faces the Gate of the Sun.
The departmental holiday for the 1809 uprising led by Murillo, with parades, brass bands and fireworks.
A Sunday when private cars are banned and the streets fill with bicycles and families walking down the Prado.
Families build tables of bread figures and fruit at home on the first day, and carry them to the cemeteries on the second.
The gateway sits on the altiplano at 4,061 metres, one of the highest international airports in the world, about 10 km from the centre. The drive down takes 30 to 45 minutes.
Ten colour-coded lines, 26 stations and more than 30 kilometres of cable. A single line costs Bs 3 and each transfer Bs 2. The only way across the city that ignores the traffic.
The municipal PumaKatari buses run fixed routes and are the comfortable option. Everything else is a minibus or trufi with the destination shouted out of the window.
The main terminal on Plaza Antofagasta handles Copacabana, Oruro, Uyuni and Sucre. Buses into the Yungas leave instead from the smaller terminal in Villa Fátima.
Chicken in a yellow chilli sauce with chuño, onion and tomato salad. One plate that explains the region.
A baked pastry with a juicy stew of beef, potato and olive inside. Eaten standing, and gone by noon.
Hot purple maize drink, thick and cinnamon-spiced, with a fried cheese pastry to dip. Market breakfast.
The city's own plate: corn on the cob, a potato, broad beans and a slab of fried cheese.
Pork stewed with yellow chilli, hominy and potato in a thin broth. Sunday morning, and taken as the cure.
A thick Aymara soup of chuño, the freeze-dried potato of the altiplano, with lamb, wheat and vegetables.
Beef heart on a skewer, grilled over coals on street corners after dark with a potato and peanut sauce.
A softer, cheese-filled cousin of the salteña, eaten with api from the bakeries around San Pedro.
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