Tiwanaku

A Tiwanaku tour through the Museo Lítico

This Tiwanaku tour starts indoors, at the Museo Lítico. You step down from the vehicle and the first thing that throws you is the silence: on the Tiwanaku day trip from La Paz there is no jungle covering anything and no mountain dominating it, only carved stone coming up out of the altiplano floor. The road here crosses El Alto and comes out onto the open pampa, and for an hour and a quarter there is nothing to prepare you for what is waiting: the odd herd, low hills, and blue a long way off. At 3,850 metres with nothing overhead, the sun burns your skin while the wind cools it — both sensations at once, all day long.

The first stop is indoors. The Museo Lítico holds the Bennett monolith: 7.30 metres tall by 1.20 wide, the largest piece on the site, and it sets the scale for everything that follows. It came out of the Semi-Subterranean Temple, was taken to La Paz in 1933 and stood there for almost seventy years, upright in a city square, before being returned to Tiwanaku in 2002. You will see it barely a kilometre from the place where it lay buried for centuries. That round trip says a good deal about how Bolivia kept changing its mind about its own past.

The Tiwanaku archaeological complex

Outside there is no shade and no reference for scale: the Tiwanaku complex — or Tiahuanaco, depending on the spelling you have seen written, the centre of a civilisation that came before the Incas — is walked entirely under open sky. The moment is when you go down into the Semi-Subterranean Temple. It is a few steps, nothing more, but at the bottom the horizon disappears: you are inside a sunken rectangle, with the altiplano above eye level and nothing but sky overhead. Fifty-seven pillars hold up the walls, and set between them are more than a hundred stone heads, facing inwards from every angle at once. No two repeat the same face, and nobody knows for certain who they represent. You are down there, and they are at your height. From there you climb to the Kalasasaya, where at both equinoxes the sun rose through the exact centre of the main doorway — not a happy coincidence, but the purpose of the building. And you reach the Gate of the Sun, carved from a single block of andesite: some three metres tall by four wide, close to ten tonnes. One stone.

Lunch in the village cuts the visit in half, and you need it: what comes afterwards is the part that gets explained least and stays with you most. At Puma Punku the question becomes physical. The largest block measures 7.8 by 5.2 metres and weighs around 131 tonnes. The red sandstone came from a quarry some ten kilometres away; the andesite from around ninety, across Lake Titicaca. And the H-shaped cuts fit into each other with a precision that is still hard to account for. The archaeological answer to those who prefer to look for it on another planet is simple and verifiable: well-preserved local precursors of this same complex have been found, meaning the technique did not appear out of nowhere — you can follow its development right here, stage by stage. What remains unresolved is enormous. But it is human, and that is what makes it more impressive. You go back to La Paz with more questions than answers, which is more or less what keeps happening to the specialists too.

Before you book this Tiwanaku tour

Before you book: a minimum of 24 h acclimatising in La Paz. The visit is entirely in the open, with full sun exposure and no shade — bring sunscreen, a hat and water. There is around 3 km of walking on flat ground, spread across the day; not recommended for reduced mobility.

Rates per person — from USD 58.

Is this your first day in La Paz and you are not acclimatised yet? See La Paz by Cable Car

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