The witches are respected characters of La Paz. On the streets Jimenez and Linares in the bolivian megapole, their shops attract tourists´eye with their colorful candies, herbal potions and dead llamas.

A couple of secrets from the witches of La Paz

Here, you can buy anything you need to accomplish your rituals to mother earth!

Don´t expect them to tell you their secrets or to let you take them in pictures. In fact, if you show a bit too much curiosity, they will stare at you with a black look, making you fear they just casted an evil spell on you. The witches market is something serious.

Don´t be scared by the usual sight of dead animals or skeletons hanging on their doors, pacha-mama (mother earth) requires sometimes bigger offrandes than just candies and herbs. The local habit is to burry a dead llama under a future house, to bring luck and prosperity over the new home. A majority of the population has strong beliefs towards pacha-mama and the witches rituals and most of construction workers will refuse to start working before the proper completion of the ritual. (Don´t worry, if you don´t know how to perform it yourself, you can always hire the witch to do so!).

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Potosi -located at 4067m- is one of the highest cities in the world, and for 400 years from the 16th century, it was also the most populated city in the world. At its peak around 150 000 people lived there, twice as much as in Paris at the same period of time. But Potosi´s history is not a happy one. We had an opportunity to visit the silver mines and get a glimpse on how the Potosi miner makes his way through the tunnels to find the precious metal, silver.

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