Travel to Santa Cruz de la Sierra

Few places on Earth bring three major ecosystems together the way the country around Santa Cruz does. To the west, Amboró National Park marks where the Andes descend into lowland jungle; to the east, the Gran Chaco’s dry forests stretch toward Paraguay; and threading between them, the Amazon basin’s moisture brings life. The result is biological diversity that staggers even seasoned naturalists: within its 4,425 square kilometers, Amboró alone holds over 800 bird species, roughly 60 percent of all the birds recorded in Bolivia.

The region’s centerpiece for wildlife is Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park. At 3.4 million hectares, it is Bolivia’s largest protected area and one of the largest intact tracts of dry forest on Earth. Established in 1995 at the initiative of the indigenous Guaraní-Isoceño people, widely described as the first protected area in the Americas created that way, Kaa-Iya is thought to hold over 1,000 jaguars, one of the largest single populations on the continent, though, as in all Chaco forest, the animals are spread thin across the vast landscape. Pumas, tapirs, giant anteaters, and the rare Chacoan peccary, once thought extinct, share the forest with around 300 bird species and the maned wolf.

Between 1691 and 1760, Jesuit missionaries and indigenous Chiquitano craftsmen created something without precedent in the Americas, a chain of mission settlements that fused European baroque architecture with local artistic traditions. Unlike the ruined missions of Paraguay and Argentina, the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos survived the Jesuit expulsion of 1767 as living towns. The churches of San Javier, Concepción, San Miguel, San Rafael, Santa Ana, and San José still hold mass, their interiors alive with original wood carvings, painted columns, and elaborate altarpieces.

When restorers began work in the 1970s, they uncovered an astonishing treasure: more than 5,000 sheets of baroque and Renaissance music composed by European missionaries and indigenous musicians in the 18th century. This archive, unique in the Americas, sparked the International Festival of Baroque Music, held every two years since 1996. Today hundreds of musicians from some sixteen countries across three continents perform in the mission churches, while music schools in each town train new generations of Chiquitano musicians in the repertoire their ancestors helped create.

Perched in the Andean foothills about 120 kilometers from Santa Cruz, El Fuerte de Samaipata holds one of the Americas’ most enigmatic archaeological sites. Its centerpiece is a massive sandstone outcrop, 220 meters long and 60 meters wide, carved with serpents, felines, geometric channels, and ceremonial seats. Peoples of the Mojocoyas culture, later associated with the Chané, began shaping this rock around 300 AD, creating a sacred site that each culture after them would transform.

In the 1470s, the Inca brought Samaipata into their empire, adding their own carvings and building a provincial center with plazas, residential quarters, and a 70-meter kallanka, or great hall. When the Spanish arrived after 1545, drawn by the silver route to Potosí, they raised Andalusian-style houses on the ancient foundations before eventually abandoning the site. UNESCO inscribed El Fuerte as a World Heritage Site in 1998, recognizing its unique testimony to the successive cultures that shaped this corner of South America.