UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Bolivia

UNESCO's Description

In the 16th century, this area was regarded as the world’s largest industrial complex. The extraction of silver ore relied on a series of hydraulic mills. The site consists of the industrial monuments of the Cerro Rico, where water is provided by an intricate system of aqueducts and artificial lakes; the colonial town with the Casa de la Moneda; the Church of San Lorenzo; several patrician houses; and the barrios mitayos, the areas where the workers lived.

From the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).

Geography

Located in the Bolivian tin belt, Cerro Rico de Potosí is the world's largest silver deposit and has been mined since the sixteenth century, producing up to 60,000 tonnes by 1996. Estimates are that much silver still remains in the mines. Potosí became the second largest city, and the site of the first mint, in the Americas. By 1891, low silver prices prompted the change to mining tin, which continued until 1985. At peak production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ore contained up to 40% silver.

The ore deposits reside in veins present in the dacite volcanic dome. The hill is "honeycombed" with underground workings, reaching from the summit to depths of 1,150 m (3,770 ft).

History

Founded in 1545 as a mining town, it soon produced fabulous wealth, and the population eventually exceeded 200,000 people. The city gave rise to a Spanish expression, still in use: valer un Potosí ("to be worth a Potosí"), meaning "to be of great value". The rich mountain, Cerro Rico, produced an estimated 60% of all silver mined in the world during the second half of the 16th century.

Potosí miners at first mined the rich oxidized ores with native silver and silver chloride (cerargyrite) that could be fed directly into smelting furnaces. Especially successful were the small clay "flower pot" furnaces called guayras, which had been used by the Incas. By 1565, the miners had exhausted the direct-smelting ore, and silver production plummeted.

Key Facts

Facts from Wikidata Q35045 (CC0).

Visiting Potosí

Potosí, at around 4,000 metres, is one of the world's highest large cities. It is located in the Potosí Department of Bolivia. The wealthy history of Potosí is reflected in the narrow streets, colonial mansions and the many churches, which make the city a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Travel notes adapted from Wikivoyage: Potosí (CC BY-SA 4.0).

UNESCO's Description

Between 1696 and 1760, six ensembles of reducciones (settlements of Christianized Indians) inspired by the ‘ideal cities’ of the 16th-century philosophers were founded by the Jesuits in a style that married Catholic architecture with local traditions. The six that remain – San Francisco Javier, Concepción, Santa Ana, San Miguel, San Rafael and San José – make up a living heritage on the former territory of the Chiquitos.

From the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).

History

In the 16th century, priests of different religious orders set out to evangelize the Americas, bringing Christianity to indigenous communities. Two of these missionary orders were the Franciscans and the Jesuits, both of which eventually arrived in the frontier town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and then in the Chiquitania. The missionaries employed the strategy of gathering the often nomadic indigenous populations in larger communities called reductions in order to more effectively Christianize them. This policy sprang from the colonial legal view of the "Indian" as a minor, who had to be protected and guided by European missionaries so as not to succumb to sin.

Location

The six World Heritage Site settlements are located in the hot and semiarid lowlands of the Santa Cruz Department of eastern Bolivia. They lie in an area near the Gran Chaco, east and northeast of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, between the Paraguay and Guapay rivers.

The westernmost missions are San Xavier (also known as San Javier) and Concepción, located in the province of Ñuflo de Chávez between the San Julián and Uruguayito rivers. Santa Ana de Velasco, San Miguel de Velasco, and San Rafael de Velasco are located to the east, in José Miguel de Velasco province, near the Brazilian border. San José de Chiquitos is located in Chiquitos province, about 200 kilometres (120 mi) south of San Rafael.

Tourism

Shortly after the start of the restoration effort, the potential for tourism in the missions was assessed in a report published by UNESCO in 1977.

To promote the missions as a tourist destination, travel agencies, chambers of commerce and industry, the towns' mayors, native communities and other institutions organized the Lanzamiento mundial del Destino Turístico "Chiquitos", Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia, a five-day tourist event lasting from March 23–27, 2006. Journalists and international tour operators were shown the important tourist attractions, and introduced to the culture through visits to museums, local workshops, various concerts, native dances, high masses, processions, crafts festivals, and local cuisine.

UNESCO's Description

The archaeological site of Samaipata consists of two parts: the hill with its many carvings, believed to have been the ceremonial centre of the old town (14th–16th centuries), and the area to the south of the hill, which formed the administrative and residential district. The huge sculptured rock, dominating the town below, is a unique testimony to pre-Hispanic traditions and beliefs, and has no parallel anywhere in the Americas.

From the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).

Key Facts

Facts from Wikidata Q876451 (CC0).

UNESCO's Description

The National Park is one of the largest (1,523,000 ha) and most intact parks in the Amazon Basin. With an altitudinal range of 200 m to nearly 1,000 m, it is the site of a rich mosaic of habitat types from Cerrado savannah and forest to upland evergreen Amazonian forests. The park boasts an evolutionary history dating back over a billion years to the Precambrian period. An estimated 4,000 species of flora as well as over 600 bird species and viable populations of many globally endangered or threatened vertebrate species live in the park.

From the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).

Geology

The Park is dominated by a large tableland of 7000 sq km, the Bolivian side of which is Serrania Huanchaca, and the Brazilian side is Sererania Ricardo Franco. The intervening Rio Verde marks the national boundary. The tableland is bounded by precipitous cliffs, 200 to 700 metres in height. The rocks of the tableland comprise Proterozoic sandstones, deposited around 1 billion years ago, intruded by a tholeiitic sill/dyke complex. These overlie an older basement of granites and metamorphic rocks which crop out over the Amazonic plain. The surface of the tableland is overlain by Cretaceous sandstones, and there are laterites and siliceous duricrusts which mark stages of Tertiary uplift and peneplanation.

Climate

The climate in the national park is seasonal, with approximately 1500mm of mean annual precipitation. There is a dry season of four months between June and September, when rainfall declines to less than 30 mm. Precipitation occurs mostly in the austral summer, originating from deep-cell convective activity over the Amazon basin and southerly extension of the Intertropical Convergence Zone during the sunniest part of the summer. The mean annual temperature is 25–26 °C (77–79 °F) but during the dry season temperatures can often drop to 10 °C (50 °F) for several days when cold dry Patagonian air masses (surazos) reach the area.

History

The area that is now the national park was explored in 1908 by Percy Fawcett on a frontier survey for the Bolivian government. In London, he showed photographs to Arthur Conan Doyle, which fired Doyle's imagination for him to write the novel The Lost World.

Founded on June 28, 1979, the park was originally named Parque Nacional Huanchaca. Less than a decade later, in 1988, the park was renamed Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado in honor of the late pioneering biologist and Bolivian conservationist Noel Kempff Mercado, both for his research and discoveries in the Park and in memory of his tragic death in the area; Mercado was murdered in the park by drug traffickers when he inadvertently stumbled across a secret cocaine laboratory high on the Huanchaca plateau.

Description

Noel Kempff Mercado National Park covers 1,523,446 hectares (3,764,520 acres) of land, which includes the Huanchaca Plateau (Huanchaca Meseta or Serrania de Huanchaca), which at 42,000 hectares is one of the largest protected tracts of undisturbed cerrado in the world. The park is located on the Brazilian Shield in the northeast Santa Cruz Department in Bolivia. The Iténez River is its eastern and northern border separating it from the neighboring Brazil. It adjoins the 158,621 hectares (391,960 acres) Serra Ricardo Franco State Park, created in 1997, in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.

Key Facts

Facts from Wikidata Q650710 (CC0).

UNESCO's Description

The city of Tiwanaku, capital of a powerful pre-Hispanic empire that dominated a large area of the southern Andes and beyond, reached its apogee between 500 and 900 AD. Its monumental remains testify to the cultural and political significance of this civilisation, which is distinct from any of the other pre-Hispanic empires of the Americas.

From the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).

Site history

The dating of the site has been significantly refined over the last century. From 1910 to 1945, Arthur Posnansky maintained that the site was 11,000–17,000 years old based on comparisons to geological eras and archaeoastronomy. Beginning in the 1970s, Carlos Ponce Sanginés proposed the site was first occupied around 1580 BC, the site's oldest radiocarbon date. This date is still seen in some publications and museums in Bolivia. Since the 1980s, researchers have recognized this date as unreliable, leading to the consensus that the site is no older than 200 or 300 BC. More recently, a statistical assessment of reliable radiocarbon dates estimates that the site was founded around AD 110 (50–170, 68% probability), a date supported by the lack of ceramic styles from earlier periods.