La Paz makes you pay for every block

FOG hides the entire world map and only your own footsteps take it back. In La Paz the footsteps are harder than anywhere, because the city is built into a canyon and the centre sits around 3,600 metres above sea level.

A city with no flat ground

La Paz sits in a bowl gouged out of the altiplano. The canyon floor holds the main axis, the Prado, formally Avenida 16 de Julio, which continues north as Avenida Mariscal Santa Cruz and south toward Sopocachi. Everything else climbs away from it. Streets run up the canyon walls at gradients that would be closed to traffic in most countries, and where the slope beats the road, there are stairs.

Above the rim sits El Alto at roughly 4,100 metres, a separate city on the flat, with the huge Feria 16 de Julio market. Far below and to the south is Zona Sur, Calacoto and San Miguel, several hundred metres lower, noticeably warmer and laid out much more loosely.

Between them, the old centre: Plaza Murillo, the colonial block of Calle Jaen, and the market streets on Sagarnaga and Linares climbing toward the Mercado de las Brujas. That climb is short in metres and long in lungs.

The afternoon route, and it goes downhill

Plan La Paz walks in the descending direction. Start high, finish low. A good first one: begin around Plaza San Francisco, climb the Sagarnaga and Linares market streets while you still have something, then work across to Calle Jaen and Plaza Murillo on the flatter shelf.

From there follow the Prado south the whole way, which is continuous, wide and gently downhill, and turn off into Sopocachi. Sopocachi is the best ordinary walking in the city: leafy, mid-slope, a real neighbourhood with Plaza Avaroa in the middle of it, and streets you can loop rather than merely survive.

That is maybe six or seven kilometres, most of it losing elevation, and it will still feel like more. The cable car network is how you get back up to where you started.

How the fog fills at altitude

The cleared map here does not look like a blob or a grid. It looks like a river system. You get a strong bright spine down the canyon floor where the Prado runs, then short tributaries branching off it up both walls, each one stopping wherever you ran out of breath. The contours are drawing your map for you.

Getting the gaps between the tributaries is the hard part, because the connections are often stairs, and stairs at 3,600 metres are a different proposition. On the first days in the city you will find that a walk you would do without thinking at sea level takes twice as long and two rests.

The upside is that the historic centre is genuinely compact. The area between Plaza Murillo, Plaza San Francisco and Calle Jaen is small, so it lights up in an afternoon and it feels earned. El Alto, on the flat above, covers ground far more easily but it is huge and its grid is enormous.

Altitude, weather and honest notes

Give yourself a couple of days before attempting anything ambitious. Altitude is not something you push through, and the difference between day one and day three is dramatic.

The dry season, roughly May to October, is the walking season: clear, bright, very strong sun, and cold once it goes down. The rainy months from December to March bring afternoon downpours and hail, and the steep streets turn into water channels quickly.

Signal is generally good because the centre is not high-rise and you are usually looking at a lot of open sky, though deep in a narrow street between canyon walls the track can wander a little.

Background exploring keeps revealing with the app closed and the screen off, which is the right way to use it when you need both hands and all your attention on the climb.

The app itself

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