Vallegrande

Vallegrande is a charming unspoiled little colonial town in cattle-farming country. It has a Sunday handicraft market and several pleasant, basic places to stay. The town's claim to fame is its proximity to La Higuera, where Che Guevara was captured and executed . In the Vallegrande hospital laundry, Che's bullet-riddled body was laid out on public view for two days after his execution, and dozens of journalists, as well as curious soldiers and civilians filed in to see it. You can still visit the hospital laundry, now an abandoned shed behind the main building. It's an evocative place, the walls covered in signatures and slogans scratched into the plaster. One of the most poignant is actually on the adobe wall of the public telephone office. It reads: “Che - alive as they never wanted you to be”.

On the plaza, in the Casa de Cultura, there is an archaeological museum, which has many photographs and an hour-long video in Spanish, which is fascinating for its original black and white footage.

La Higuera and the Che Guevara Trail

A 'Che Guevara Trail', which would follow the last movements of Che and his band as they tried to flee the pursuing Bolivian Army, has been proposed as a way of attracting tourism to the area. An ambitious 815-km circuit, winding its way along dirt roads in the sub-tropical area bordering Santa Cruz and Chuquisaca departments, was officially inaugurated in 2004. This region is one of the poorest in Bolivia and the Guaraní people who live here mostly rely on subsistence farming to survive. In the wake of Che's defeat in 1967, the local population suffered reprisals at the hands of the Bolivian military. It is hoped they will derive greater benefit from the influx of curious tourists than they did, 40 years ago, from the arrival of desperate revolutionaries.