Building  the Future of Santa Cruz de la Sierra

The city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in eastern Bolivia, is home to well over 1 million people, and is widely known as the economic center of the country. It is a city not shown in postcards, but whose contributions, both economically and culturally, are vital. And here, a better future is being built on a daily basis: according to the  National Statistics Institute, 52%  of the total area of Bolivia under construction is located in Santa Cruz.

Heat, blue sky, the boiling asphalt and a cool breeze that dries the sweat that falls from the forehead, we are at the time of year when winter still wants to exist. Yet locals know that in Santa Cruz, spring it is eternal. Here, it is nearly always perfect conditions for exploration.

So you take your bike and pedal your way from the Villa Olímpica, a huge space where motocross and similar activities take place, along the 5th anillo, or ring, at the  south of the city. A few short years ago, this spot was far away, a distant destination for those in the city center. Now, it is part of a usual route, and the streets surrounding it are paved. The lack of signals may be confusing, but still you manage to find the street name you are looking for in the stenciled signs that radio taxi drivers place on street corners. Here, if the municipality doesn’t do these things, the people manage it themselves.

Santa Cruz has grown and continues to do so, as the regions arenals, or areas of sandy land, seem to migrate further and further outward. Where are they today? The ninth ring? That it is almost Cotoca, to the east, at least 45 minutes by bus from the center.

Radials and rings create a system that any visitor to Santa Cruz should be familiar with to understand this city. Back in the early 1990s, this system exploded and expanded, growing until the fourth ring to the west side, where it collided with the Pirai River. Today, the city extends from the historic center,the Casco Viejo, to a ninth ring.

The first ring surrounds the Casco Viejo, and is about 12 blocks in diameter. A second ring surrounds the first at a distance of another 12 blocks away, and the pattern repeats to create a third inner ring, leaving some space for the third outer ring. A fourth ring is about another fifteen blocks out, and so will expand the city. Radials cross the city from north to south, from east to west, and all directions in between, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. This patterned plan has been shelved, but remains as a sort of transit web.

The road is long, but you don´t hurry. Now you have to get to the other side of town, at least one hour of pedaling. But the city is flat, and the challenge is both exhilarating and comfortable. For many years the city only grew sideways, but along the way across town you can’t escape the fact that something different is happening: the city is growing upwards. The gigantic Palacio de Justicia, once the only building piercing the skyline, is today accompanied by a dozen new buildings, particularly to the north, where you are headed.

Although traffic is rough and road safety education is lacking, bicycles have been taking over the streets of Santa Cruz. There is no design for bike paths, yet cyclists use the streets to move alongside cars and buses. Elsewhere this may not mean too much, but here it represents overcoming significant challenges to have commuters pedaling on two wheels on the city’s roadways. There are no ups and downs, and with enough air to power the lungs of these bikers, many groups are being organized to ensure the rights of cyclists, and to include these rights in the urban planning.

To cross through the Casco Viejo is to experience the Santa Cruz of yesteryear in full conversation with the Santa Cruz now. Despite a modern building boom in the 1970s, galleries, courtyards and aljibes of decades and centuries past have been recovered, and today remnants of the classic Santa Cruz style remain. Under the protection of the mayor, it is now forbidden to demolish or renovate these architectural artifacts without municipal permission.

The Catedral Mayor de San Lorenzo, with its elegant brickwork, recently celebrated its 100-year anniversary. Perhaps the most emblematic building of this city, it blends perfectly with La Pascana, a remodeled old building with exposed brick which houses a courtyard and a gallery.

This architecture represents a moment in history, and serves as a tangible reflection of a key concept important to any cruceño building an ideal home: no matter how much money is needed to invest, a home must have a barbecue and a social area. Although current trends can leave this colonial style to the aluminum minimalism and neo-rationalism popular with contemporary designers, some have managed to combine the galleries and courtyards of 500 years ago with modern design, retrieving some of the forms of the past to marry with future-forward aesthetics.

Places like the restaurant-museum El Aljibe remind us of the not so distant past, where the size of the aljibe determined the wealth of a family. And of a place where the food tastes like it was made by an elderly grandma who spent a lifetime here, a city that now has four huge shopping malls that seem to blend in more and more every day as the architecture in Santa Cruz modernises. The Ventura Mall is Bolivia’s largest, and is home to CineMark and the Hard Rock Café. It stands in a neighbourhood almost reaching the Pirai River, an area that used to be considered the city limits of the 4th ring to the east, but that is now one of the more developed areas of the city. A bridge was built to cross the river nearby, and this area is where the rich captains of industry build modern business centers, luxury condos and even artificial beaches, equipped with electrically generated waves. Not many buses arrive here, as those who live and work nearby access the area with private cars. You, however, choose to arrive by bicycle, a routine performed by hundreds of cyclists every weekend.

Although there isn’t even an avant-garde style generated by and for cruceños, there are colorful new buildings that arouse people's curiosity. One such building, the Omnia Lux, a brickwork tower, has gained recognition from the Faculty of Architecture of the UPSA (Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz), the top university in the city.

So what comes next for Santa Cruz? What is to be done with this merging of old and new architectures? As you finish your ride across this crowded city, maybe you would think that the old architecture of the past must retain its traditional essence and become the 'must have' of the new architectures emerging in this city that every day grows bigger and, like its citizens, becomes more cosmopolitan.

The author would like to thank Arch. Ernesto Urzagasti, Guillermo Mediana and Eliana Rivero for their insights and expertise in the research of this article.

Bolivia’s Artisanal Beer Scene is Brewing

‘I want drinking beer to be an experience.’

—Jaime Andres Sánchez, founder of Abbey Road pub

‘You mess around with recipes and different ingredients, and you can taste something completely new.’

— Jorge ‘Coco’ Flores

A small, inconspicuous door at the end of Calle Belisario Salinas in Sopocachi leads into a dimly lit room resonating with the Beatles’ greatest hits. Tubs of barley and aged barrels litter the shelves of Abbey Road, a bar that has been serving some of Bolivia’s finest artisanal beer for over four years.

Something spectacular is happening here – a revolution, of sorts. Beer has been reinventing itself. Small breweries are refreshing, reviving and changing beer culture as we know it.

You’d have to go back 70 years to find as many breweries across the world as we have now. From Czech-style pilsners to peppy India Pale Ales (IPAs) and stouts, there’s such an incredible variety that if you think you don’t like beer, there’s still hope. La Paz’s craft brew scene is currently being proliferated by both Bolivians and expats, and the Bolivian mainstream lager is being shaken up.

The diversity of climate in Bolivia makes for an impressive variety of beers. In the fertile coca-growing valleys of the Andes, white beers prevail over the stiers of Cochabamba. In the tropical lowlands, high-carbonated beers give way to the wheat-heavy brews of Santa Cruz.

Jaime Andres Sánchez, the founder of Abbey Road, learnt his trade in Cochabamba and began making artisanal beer 10 years ago. He now sells beers from all over Bolivia, and continues to brew his own. ‘I set out to produce artisanal beer as a completely different product,’ he explains. ‘There’s much more flexibility with flavours and ingredients in craft beer. I was looking for something that could be enjoyed on the merit of its taste.’

Defining craft beer is infamously difficult. You can’t restrict it to a list of ingredients or type of packaging. It’s antithetical to rules, and any attempt to define it is a retrograde step. Craft beer’s aim is the design of flavour; defining it will swap quantity for quality, and stifle innovation. It can only encourage a conservative mindset.

As the Bolivian gastronomy movement gains momentum, brewers have been rediscovering the roles that traditional ingredients can play. Multiple breweries offer quinoa (and even coca) beers, but the learning curve is still steep. Many of these still have the quality of experiments designed as novelty products for tourists.

I ask Jaime why he chose La Paz, a city with notably fewer microbreweries than its urban counterparts in Bolivia – Cochabamba, for example, produces more artisanal beer than anywhere else in the country.  ‘People are cosmopolitan in La Paz, so I thought I could introduce a higher-quality product without having to worry about branding,’ he reveals. ‘After all, I just want to teach people about beer.’

Indeed, educating people about the benefits of drinking craft beer is high on the agenda of its promoters. In Sucre, I spoke with Marcelo Villa Salinas, the owner of Goblin Cerveza Artesanal. ‘The culture of artisanal beer in Bolivia is just starting,’ he tells me, smoking a cigarette and sipping from an amber-coloured beer that he makes on site. ‘We need to teach people about the brewing process to make craft beer more commercially viable.’

For Jaime, microbreweries are a fail-safe option for young entrepreneurs. Established companies teach new brewers the best practices to reduce spoilage, and unlike other industries, home brewing experience is enough to get started. With low operational costs, immediate sales and potentially lucrative margins, it’s easy to see why the number of craft breweries operating in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past seven years.

The manufacturing process remains laborious, however. I meet with Jorge Flores, known by his friends as Coco. He’s a budding brewer from La Paz who makes and bottles his own beer using online tutorials. ‘For people with little experience like me, producing beer is not easy; it’s a trial-and-error process,’ he reveals. ‘There are so many variables that you have to control: which malts you mix, the tonality of the beer, the type of yeast you use, the temperature during fermentation, the amount of gas you add to the liquid and the pasteurisation.’

Jaime also recognises the difficulties involved in homebrewing. ‘The stability of the product and how it keeps is the hardest thing to control,’ he says. ‘When you make beer, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out, and this is something you have to realise as a producer.’

In spite of the efforts of people like Jaime, Bolivia’s artisanal beer scene remains underdeveloped. No one I talk to is able to give an explanation for the lack of hop cultivation or draught beer here. All three men are shocked when I tell them about the omnipresence of IPAs and taprooms in England.

Jaime acknowledges that the fight for craft beer in Bolivia has only just begun – teaching  people to differentiate between a stout and a Paceña will take time. ‘I am slowly managing to teach people and get loyal clientele, but some people still come in asking for Huari and Corona,’ he reveals. With mainstream lager sales taking 94% of the Bolivian market share in 2014 (and a monopoly on exportation), an age of exclusively artisanal beer-drinking seems a long way off.

Yet Jaime’s passion for his product is infectious. ‘I want drinking beer to be an experience,’ he tells me. ‘I’m selling a concept and showing people that they don’t have to be scientists to make their own beer. Brewers are a community of people who want to try new things and share them with others.’

Marcelo sees that ground is being made. ‘When I started, I could count the number of microbrewers in Bolivia on one hand – 90% of my customers were tourists,’ he says. ‘But now people are learning, and half of the people who come here are Bolivians.’

Globally, traditional low-cost beers are going out of style. According to Anheuser-Busch’s own data, 44% of people between the ages of 21 and 27 have never even tried Budweiser. Dutch brewing company Heineken recently bought a 50% stake in US-based beer maker Lagunitas Brewing Co. to expand into the artisanal beer industry. Corporations are scared, and rightly so: the face of the industry has changed, and Bolivia seems to be moving with it.

A large part of craft beer’s appeal is that anyone can have a go. ‘Brewing’s just like making a soup,’ says Coco. ‘You mess around with recipes and different ingredients, and you can taste something completely new.’

The future of Bolivian beer may not be blonde and bubbly, but it is bright. A new idea has arrived.

Abbey Road is located on Calle Belisario Salinas, on the corner of Andrés Muñoz in Sopocachi (two blocks up from Plaza Avaroa). It’s open on Thursday and Friday from 7:30 pm to 1:30 am, and
Saturday from 8:30 pm to 2:30 am.

To find out more about homebrewing in Bolivia, check out the Embracing Limitations blog at orientebrewolero.wordpress.com.

As I sat in the teléferico for the first time, slowly rolling up the valley to El Alto, a friend pointed out what we thought to be a multicoloured LGBTQ flag. Even the Bolivians that I spoke to were unaware of the banner’s origins. Finding out its exact meaning would require a look back into history.

The Wiphala is a symbol of the Aymara people and emerged during the days of the Incan Empire, where it was a processional banner. It consists of 49 small squares in a seven-by-seven grid. The seven colours in the grid are representations of the rainbow, a theme that occurs repeatedly in Quechua and Aymara art and design. Arranged diagonally, each row and column is made of the seven distinct colours. 

Four different Wiphala arrangements were used during the Incan Empire, representing the four Incan provinces. The colour of the longest diagonal line indicates which region the Wiphala represents:

White: Collasuyu (the southeastern province, representing the territories of Peru, Bolivia, and parts of Chile and Argentina)

Yellow: Cuntisuyu (the southwestern province, representing southwestern Peru)

Red: Chinchansuyu (the northwestern province, covering Ecuador, central and northern Peru, and southwestern Colombia)

Green: Antisuyu (the eastern province, made up of eastern Peru and part of Bolivia)

In recent years (notably the mobilisation of indigenous movements in the 1970s), the Wiphala has been adopted in neighbouring South American countries, and has become ubiquitous at pan-Andean public events and demonstrations. Bolivian President Evo Morales established the Collasuyu Wiphala as the nation's dual flag along with the previous red, yellow and green banner in the newly-ratified constitution. In this modern form, the seven colours of the Wiphala have acquired new meanings:

Red: The Earth and the Andean man

Orange: Society and culture

Yellow: Energy

White: Time

Green: Natural resources and the environment

Blue: Space and the heavens

Violet: Andean government and self-determination

For more information about the history of Bolivia and the Incan Empire, see Waltraud Q. Morales’ A Brief History of Bolivia.