Sucre is in the constitution, the government sits in La Paz

On the map Bolivia often gets a single word for its capital: Sucre. Anyone who looks there for the president is looking in the wrong place. The constitution keeps Sucre. The daily work of government happens in La Paz.

Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State, is a landlocked country in South America. It borders Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile. The area is 1,098,581 square kilometres, the population 12,581,843. Between those figures lie the high plateau, the valleys and the tropical lowlands to the east. A state of this shape has more than one centre, even when the constitution names only one capital.

Sucre in the text, La Paz in office

The constitution in force says that Sucre is the capital of Bolivia. This is the legal sentence the map has to answer to. Sucre, formerly Chuquisaca, carries that rank, and the supreme court sits there. Tell the state only through its ministries and that sentence disappears.

La Paz is where the country is governed. The government palace stands on Plaza Murillo, the ministries sit in the city, and the plurinational legislative assembly meets there. La Paz is the seat of government. The constitution does not turn that fact into the title of capital. The split is older than the present text. It also survived the renaming of the state as plurinational. One place holds the word capital. Another holds daily power.

High plateau, lowland, no sea

In the west lies the Altiplano, high, wide and cold, with Lake Titicaca on the border with Peru. Then the valleys drop away. To the east and north the country becomes tropical lowland belonging to the Amazon basin. In the south-east the Chaco meets Paraguay. These regions have their own cities, their own roads and their own political weight. Santa Cruz in the lowlands has long been a centre of its own, even though neither the constitution nor the seat of government is there.

Bolivia has no coast. The border with Chile is the border with a Pacific the state does not reach. The treaty of peace and friendship of 1904 fixes that border. The lack of access to the sea remains a subject of Bolivian politics, in La Paz as in Sucre. It does not change the map. Ports the country uses lie in other states. Being landlocked is not a footnote to the capital question. It is the frame in which Sucre and La Paz carry two roles at all.

Sucre is the capital because the constitution says so. La Paz is the seat of government because power works there.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Many languages, one boliviano

The official languages are Spanish and the indigenous languages the constitution lists by name, among them Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní. The central government and the departmental governments must use at least two official languages, one of them Spanish. That is not a symbol in the margin of the flag. It is a rule for a state that calls itself plurinational. In the offices Spanish remains the language that has to travel everywhere. The other languages are official where they are spoken, and they are official by the constitution, not by folklore.

The currency is the same everywhere. The boliviano is issued by the central bank and holds on the plateau as in the lowlands. The money binds what geography pulls apart and what the capital question places in two cities. The state is plurinational in language. It is split in the seat of its institutions. It is single in the constitution that names Sucre, and in a coin that needs no second name.

To read Bolivia is to leave Sucre and La Paz on the map together. The high plateau does not explain the country on its own, nor do the lowlands, and the sea does not explain it either, because there is no sea. The state wrote itself one capital and gave itself another place from which to govern.