Bolivia’s festivals bring Andean and Amazonian peoples together with Catholic saints — devils dancing to the Virgin of the Mineshaft in Oruro, miniature wishes blessed in La Paz, and feathered sun warriors in the town of San Ignacio de Moxos.
Photo: Pame82s, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
All three festivals in this atlas are on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: the Carnival of Oruro, proclaimed a Masterpiece in 2001, the Ichapekene Piesta of San Ignacio de Moxos, inscribed in 2012, and the ritual journeys in La Paz during Alasita, inscribed in 2017.
Each shows how Indigenous beliefs have lived on inside Catholic celebrations: Andean deities hidden behind the Virgin of Candlemas in Oruro, the Aymara god Ekeko blessed at the cathedral of La Paz, and a Mojeño founding myth retold through the feast of St Ignatius.
Alasita
From 24 January, the streets of La Paz fill with stalls selling everything in miniature — houses, cars, diplomas, bundles of tiny banknotes — to be blessed and given away in the hope that the real thing will follow within the year, under the smiling eye of Ekeko, god of abundance.
January 24, 2027Calculated
Carnaval de Oruro
In the Bolivian highlands, some 28,000 dancers and 10,000 musicians dance their way along a four-kilometre route to the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Mineshaft — devils, llama herders and caporales in a carnival where Andean gods and Catholic saints have long shared the stage.
February 6 – 8, 2027Calculated
In a former Jesuit mission town in Bolivia’s Beni department, the Mojeño people honour St Ignatius with weeks of novenas, dances and fireworks — culminating in the dance of the macheteros, sun warriors crowned with great fans of feathers.
July 30 – August 2, 2027Calculated