El Alto

El Alto is the city on the edge. It stands at 4,150 metres on the flat lip of the altiplano directly above La Paz, a million people in brick on a plain that was fields fifty years ago, and it is the highest large city on earth. It is Aymara, working, and louder in colour than anywhere in Bolivia. Our El Alto snapback is a deep green-and-gold stripe on black, the earth family, Pacha.

The city on the rim

From the rim the whole of La Paz falls away below you into its canyon, and behind you El Alto runs flat to the horizon. It grew from a suburb to a city in a generation, mostly Aymara families moving in from the countryside, and it now has more people than the capital it looks down on. The airport is here, the cable cars come up here, and when El Alto blocks the roads, La Paz stops.

The market and the cholets

The Thursday and Sunday market at 16 de Julio is one of the largest open-air markets in South America, streets of it, and cloth is one small corner: aguayo by the length, in bales, for people who will carry things in it. The other thing El Alto is known for is its architecture: the cholets, tall houses built by Aymara merchants with facades in bold geometric colour, scarlet, green, gold, glass, drawn from the same stripe-and-step vocabulary as the cloth. Pattern as language, in brick.

The cap named El Alto

The El Alto is a flat-brim snapback in a deep green-and-gold Andean stripe on black with gold chakana embroidery, one of three snapbacks we make. It sits in the earth family with the Iquitos and the Cochabamba bag, and its neighbour down the hill is the blue denim La Paz.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · Tacna · La Paz · Copacabana · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear and bags, and the cloth families on the weaves.