La Paz and the Witches’ Market

This is not a themed attraction. It is a working market for a living religious practice.

The Witches' Market, El Mercado de las Brujas or La Hechiceria, sits in Cerro Cumbre, a mountain clearing in La Paz, Bolivia. It runs along Linares street in the El Rosario neighbourhood and spills into Jiménez, Santa Cruz and Illampu. The English name exists so foreigners can find it. In 2019 it was named Intangible Cultural Heritage of La Paz.

Most of the stalls are run by Aymara women known as chifreras. The practitioners are yatiri, local witch doctors, and you can pick them out by their black hats and their coca pouches of amulets, talismans and powders promising luck, beauty and fertility. They sell potions, dried frogs, medicinal plants such as retama, and armadillos used in Bolivian ritual, and they do fortune-telling, love magic and curses.

The best known items are the dried llama fetuses, called sullus, which are buried under the foundations of houses across Bolivia as an offering to Pachamama. Pachamama rituals fall mainly in October, which is by far the market's busiest month: locals reckon around 60 per cent of sales happen then. February, during Carnival, is the other peak.

National Geographic put the wider context well: a recent boom in spiritual retreats has sent travellers to the Amazon looking for ayahuasca, and few realise that Bolivia holds an older mysticism running back thousands of years, with brujas, the Kallawaya medicine men of the altiplano, and curanderos.

Go respectfully. People are buying these things because they believe in them.