It's remarkable because this is one of the few cities in the world where the poor live physically above the rich, and where the vast majority are indigenous - from just one of the country's many ethnic groups.
Hundreds of thousands of people have flooded in from the countryside to find work and opportunity, but increasingly the reason they give for moving is that frequent droughts, erratic rainfall, heatwaves, unseasonal frosts and floods have made conditions too hard to grow crops. Bolivia has had five major droughts or heatwaves, as well as floods and major mudslides in the past decade. Few people in El Alto could be classed entirely as "climate refugees", but the changing physical environment is clearly one of the new drivers of people to this burgeoning city.
We talked at some length with Mario Mamani. He came from Pinaya village high in the Andes, below the great snowcapped Illimani mountain, arriving in El Alto about six years ago. It was really tough to start with, he said, but now he gets work as a driver. He hasn't seen his 80-year-old parents for more than a year but he was doing well. His home has running water, his family doesn't go hungry, and he and his wife are building a small house for his parents within their yard. In a few weeks, they would come and the family would be together.
Many others in El Alto, he said, move between the city and their villages, growing crops on their ancestral land, and getting occasional work in the city or in the mines. Mamani longed to return to Pinaya, but thought it would be impossible to survive. "Yes, there has been a big climate change there … That's the reason why we had to move and settle here in the city," he said. "We had hail, we had frost, which made it difficult to make enough money to live. Maybe it was because the weather was already tired, because at times it was OK and at times it was not." Read the full report here.
Source: John Vidal, guardian.co.uk.
