Bolivia's White City — colonial university town, the constitutional capital, Inca-era dinosaur footprints, and the finest chocolate in South America
Sucre is Bolivia's constitutional capital — a UNESCO World Heritage city at 2,750m in the Chuquisaca valley, 160km north of Potosí. Called 'la Ciudad Blanca' (the White City) for the whitewashed Baroque and Neoclassical facades that make the old city centre one of the most visually unified colonial townscapes in South America. The city has the best-preserved Spanish colonial architecture in Bolivia — the Casa de la Libertad (where Bolivia declared independence in 1825), the Universidad Mayor de San Francisco Xavier (founded 1624, one of the oldest universities in the Americas), and the surrou…
Sucre (originally named La Plata, then Chuquisaca, then Charcas) was the seat of the Audiencia de Charcas — the Spanish colonial court of justice that governed Upper Peru (what is now Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina) from 1559. The city's university (founded 1624) became the intellectual centre of the Spanish colonial empire's southern half — the ideas of the Enlightenment that sparked the independence movement were debated here. Bolivia declared independence in the Casa de la Libertad on 6 August 1825; the city was renamed Sucre after Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's gene…