El Alto
— a city the sky leans on.
Not only on a wall.
“The Aymara city on the rim of the canyon that holds La Paz, four thousand and fifty metres above the sea. The painted cholets of Freddy Mamani rise five and six storeys along the avenues, their facades cut in the geometry of Tiwanaku and the colours of the pollera skirt. The cable cars of Mi Teleférico drop into the bowl below every two minutes, and at altitude the sky reads a darker, closer blue.
El Alto, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
El Alto stands on the rim of the Altiplano at about 4,150 metres above sea level, looking down on La Paz, which fills the canyon below. It is among the highest major cities in the world. The 2012 census recorded just under 850,000 residents; current estimates exceed a million, the majority of Aymara descent. Until the 1980s the area was a high-altitude district of La Paz; it was incorporated as a separate municipality in 1985 and is now the fastest-growing city in Bolivia.
The cholet, a hybrid of *chalet* and *cholo*, is the defining architecture of the new city. The architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre has built more than seventy of them since 2005, five and six-storey facades that pull motifs from Tiwanaku iconography, Aymara textile geometry, and the bright colour-blocks of the pollera. Each building typically holds a commercial floor at the street, a ballroom on the second, rental apartments above, and the owner's penthouse on the roof.
At 4,150 metres the air carries about sixty percent of the oxygen available at sea level. Visitors arriving from low altitude commonly feel the elevation within an hour: shortness of breath, slowed pace, a deeper sleep that takes a few nights to settle. Locals chew coca leaves and drink mate de coca through the day. The cable-car network Mi Teleférico, opened in 2014 and now the longest urban gondola system in the world at over thirty kilometres of line, links the rim to the city below.