Times of
bloody battles in the stony lands of the
Andes. Evil winds of desolation descended of the snowy picks of
the mountain range. War and fright, blood and death, because in
the lands, stolen to the mythical sons of the Sun, the Spanish
conquerors brandished the sword and loaded the guns to support
their desires of wealth and to kill the ambition of their own
blood brothers.
When the clamors
of the civil war ceased, Don Pedro de la Gasca, ordered, to the
captain Alonso de Mendoza, the creation of a city to commemorate
the end of the confrontations. The command was completed on October
20th, 1548, when "the discordant ones in agreement, in peace
and love, joined, and a town of peace was founded for perpetual
memory", as the plate sent seven years later by the King
Carlos V reads.
La
Paz was founded; headquarters of the
government
of Bolivia and capital of the department of the same name. Since
its foundation, the city has known how to harmonize those features
of its cultural and architectural inheritance, with discreet flashes
of modernity that constitute authentic brushstrokes of the future
in the andean height.
Squares invaded
by hundreds of hungry doves...
peace
doves?, markets of crafts in which words in quechua and aymara
are whispered, a valley that resembles to the moon surface, streets
in perpetual ascent that end in sublime colonial churches... but,
it is necessary to walk slowly, to avoid the rigors of the 3,640
m.a.s.l.
Days of peace
and of an exaggeratedly blue sky in one of the jewels of the Andes
that glows due to the protector presence of the Illimani (6,403
meters of altitude), the powerful guardian of the most important
city in Bolivia, arisen when the clamors of the civil war ceased
among the Spanish conquerors.