Amazing Facts About Bolivia



  • Bolivia has 37 official languages.
  • The second-largest lake in Bolivia is called Lake Poopo. It's not a freshwater lake.
  • La Paz, Bolivia, was the first South American city to get an electricity supply. It was powered by llama dung.
  • There is a prison in Bolivia where inmates rent their own cells, can live with their families, charge tourists for tours and at one point produced almost all the cocaine in Bolivia.
  • The main exporter of Brazil nuts is not Brazil. It's Bolivia.
  • Demand for quinoa in Western nations has pushed up prices so much that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, where quinoa is from, can no longer afford their staple crop.
  • The average women in Bolivia, Indonesia, and Guatemala is short enough to be considered a Dwarf (4'10 or under).
  • There's a hotel in Bolivia made almost entirely of salt, complete with salt beds and chairs.
  • Most homes in Bolivia have a dried llama fetus thrown under its foundations for luck.
  • There's a limestone cliff with over 5,000 dinosaur footprints in Bolivia, with many dating back 68 million years.
  • One of Bolivia's oldest silver mines has claimed the lives of an estimated 8 million people in the past 500 years. It is known as the "Mountain that eats men" and is still mined with pick and shovel today.
  • Bolivia was named after Simon Bolivar, a military leader who led Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia to independence.
  • More than 60% of Bolivia's citizens are indigenous, predominantly Quechua and Aymara.
  • "Tinku" is a festival in Bolivia where people beat each other for 2 or 3 days straight.
  • Bolivia was not a landlocked country. Its territory on the Pacific Ocean was lost to Chile after the War of the  Pacific in the mid 19th century.
  • Landlocked Bolivia maintains a standing navy, in preparation for the day it reconquers coastline lost to Chile in the 19th Century.
  • 60% of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, but it's also in Peru (13%), Colombia (10%), Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
  • Bolivia has had as much coups and revolutions in its history (above 190) as years it has been independent for.
  • The South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar was, at various times, president of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
  • At 10,582sq km in size and about 100km across, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia the world's largest salt flat is roughly the size of Jamaica.
  • In Bolivia, llama droppings are used to purify water.

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