Palca Canyon

You walk down, slowly, through two and a half hours of ravine, from Uni to Palca. You leave La Paz an hour or an hour and a half earlier, and the minibus drops you in the main square of Uni. The first thing you notice there is that the noise of the city stayed behind: there are dogs, a couple of stalls, wind moving the dust. Palca Canyon — the Cañón de Palca — runs about eight kilometres end to end; the walk leaves you in the village of Palca. Palca means fork — the word is Aymara and Quechua at once — and it names exactly what this place is: the point where two waters and two roads come together.

The ground is a bed of loose gravel, sand and rounded stones that shift under your soles and make you watch where you put your feet. That ends up being the rhythm of the day: short steps, eyes down, and every so often a stop to lift your head. Because the walls are up there, and they do not accompany the walk: they dominate it. Dozens of obelisks rise more than two hundred metres above the bed you are treading. And what looks like granite is not: it is sandstone and conglomerate, soft rock that water and wind spent millions of years carving, and that is precisely why it could stand up in shapes this vertical. The colour changes with whichever mineral ended up exposed — ochres, reds, greys, almost violet in the stretches left in shade — and changes again as the sun moves from one side of the ravine to the other. No two stretches are alike, and that is not a figure of speech: it is how the place was formed.

You walk between 3,200 and 3,500 metres. The terrain asks nothing technical of you, but the air does: at first you do not notice, and an hour in you realise you are talking a good deal less than when you started. It is not tiredness, it is economy; the body works it out on its own. A few eucalyptus trees appear among the rock, green and out of place in all that stone, and there is silence: not the silence of hearing nothing, but of hearing only your own footsteps and, a long way off, water. At some point on the way down you will look back and up. The rim you came in by is a very long way behind now, reduced to a thin line, and you cannot see the path you arrived on. That is when the scale falls into place all at once: you are not looking at the canyon from outside, you are walking inside it.

The walk does not end at a viewpoint: it ends in a square. Palca is a living municipality, mostly Aymara, the first section of the Pedro Domingo Murillo province, and at that hour it has the rhythm of any altiplano town in mid-afternoon. You arrive with tired legs and Illimani still in view — 6,438 metres, the highest summit in the Cordillera Real — after it accompanied a good part of your descent. On the way back to La Paz the minibus stops at the Alaxpacha viewpoint, on the south side of the city. After several hours on foot that pause has a different value: it is the moment to let your legs go and get your strength back, with the aperitif included, before the last few kilometres.

Before you book: 24 h in La Paz beforehand is required. It is a physically long day (9-10 h including transfers): good general fitness, a good night’s sleep beforehand, an unhurried pace and constant hydration during the descent are recommended — the altitude (3,200-3,500 m) makes itself felt even though the trail asks nothing technical. Timings are approximate and can vary with the group’s pace and the condition of the path. The drinks service includes an alcohol-free option; the driver does not drink alcohol, and moderation is advised given the altitude.

Rates per person — from USD 99.

Would you rather have just the sunset, without the canyon walk? See Valleys at Sunset