Experience the best of Potosí

Potosí stands at about 4,000 metres in the Bolivian Altiplano, among the highest cities in the world, beneath the red peak of Cerro Rico. Silver was found on the mountain in 1545, and in the following century the city grew into one of the largest and richest in the Spanish empire. The Spanish phrase 'worth a Potosí' came to mean vast wealth. The historic centre is a World Heritage site.

The Casa Nacional de Moneda, an eighteenth-century royal mint with thick stone walls, now holds a museum of coinage, art and the mining story. Churches such as San Francisco, San Lorenzo with its carved baroque doorway and Santo Domingo line steep, narrow streets of balconied houses. Cooperatives still mine Cerro Rico. Sucre lies to the north-east, and the great salt flat of Uyuni to the south-west.

Salteñas, baked pasties of meat in a sweet and spicy sauce, are a mid-morning habit, and kalapurka, a thick soup heated with a hot volcanic stone, is warming food. Coca-leaf tea eases the altitude, and the days are sunny while the nights fall below freezing in the dry months.