La Paz

On October 20, 1548, the Spanish soldier Alonso de Mendoza laid out a new settlement on a high Andean plateau and named it Nuestra Señora de La Paz. The name was not optimistic. Earlier that year, at the Battle of Jaquijahuana in April 1548, the royalist viceroy Pedro de la Gasca defeated and executed Gonzalo Pizarro, ending nearly a decade of brutal civil war among the Spanish soldiers who had divided Peru among themselves. The city was the name of a truce written in blood.

The Spanish word paz descends from Latin pax, one of the most consequential words in the Roman political vocabulary. Pax meant more than the absence of war: it meant a formal settlement, a binding agreement, the state imposed by power rather than negotiated by equals. The Pax Romana and the Pax Dei draw from the same root, which connects to the Proto-Indo-European root peh2g, meaning to fasten or bind. Peace, in this lineage, is something you are fastened into.

Mendoza chose the location partly because the valley carved by the Choqueyapu River offered shelter from the fierce winds of the altiplano. The Aymara had recognized the same microclimate and called the region Chuquiago Marka, meaning roughly the farm of the gold mine. Spanish missionaries shortened Nuestra Señora de La Paz to La Paz within a generation. The Aymara name survived as Chuquiago in informal local speech, a parallel geography running beneath the official one.

La Paz became the seat of government of Bolivia in 1899, after the Federal War shifted political power from Sucre to the highlands. The city's government buildings sit at roughly 3,640 meters above sea level. The full official name remains Nuestra Señora de La Paz, though no one has used it in ordinary speech for centuries. The peace that Mendoza commemorated in 1548 lasted about as long as most peaces do.