Sights

Tarija's epicentre is at Plaza Luis de Fuentes y Vargaswith a statue of the city's founder. Around it are the impressive buildings of the Alcaldíaand Prefecturaand some restaurants with sidewalk seating. A block away, on Calle Campero y La Madrid is the cathedraliopen for mass evenings, first built in 1611, it contains a chapel holding the remains of many prominent chapacos, among them the city's founding father.

The most interesting church is the Basílica de San Francisco. Built in 1606, this is the oldest church in the city and it is beautifully painted inside, with praying angels depicted on the ceiling and the four evangelists at the four corners below the dome. In back of the church is the Museo Fray Francisco Miguel de Mari with colonial and contemporary art collections, silverware, priest's vestments embroidered with gold threads and an outstanding collection of colonial books, including a 1501 edition of The Iliad, as well as numerous modern reference works, 19th-century photograph albums on Bolivia, and diaries from the Chaco War. Also part of San Francisco complex is the Biblioteca Franciscana, an impressive library with a 15,000-volume old section and a newer one with a further 5000 books.

The cathedral on Avenida General Bernardo Trigo and next to a pleasant, shady square is the Church of San Roque, built in 1887 and dedicated to the town's patron saint. Although a minor church in ecclesiastical terms, the battleship-grey building is architecturally the most interesting, and it serves as the city's most identifiable landmark. To the left of the church in the Casa Parroquial is a small museum with the robes made for the saint's image.

The Capilla San Juan de Dios was built in 1632 and marks the site where the Spaniards officially surrendered after the Battle of La Tablada. It has stained glass above an ornate carved door. There are views of the city and its surroundings from the Loma de San Juan, a park with a statue of Christ (Sagrado Corazón de Jesús) on top, due north of the Capilla San Juan.

The Museo de Arqueología y Paleontología is part of the Universidad Juan Misael Saracho. It contains, downstairs, a one-room palaeontological collection, including dinosaur bones, fossils and the remains of several Andean elephants (one of which a family found under their patio following an earth tremor in 1999). Upstairs there are smaller mineralogical, ethnographic and anthropological collections. These are generally well presented and explained.

The Casa Dorada, also known as Maison d'Or, was built by Italian architects in art nouveau style for the 19th-century importer/exporter Moisés Navajas and his wife Esperanza Morales. It now houses the Casa de Cultura. Begun in 1878 and inaugurated in 1903, the house displays the ultimate opulence from its era, including Italian murals (two Italian artists spent years on site), European furniture, a Sistine Chapel-style painted ceiling in the private chapel, much gold leaf, a music room with a grand piano, crystal table lamps in the form of bunches of grapes in the dining room and much more. It has been described as a superb example of kitsch decorative art.

The riverside is a pleasant place for a stroll. There are a couple of parks along the shore. Towards the northwest end of Avenida Las Américas is Parque Oscar Alfaro , a children's park with open-air theatre, nice gardens, swimming pools and small zoo. Further down river by the pedestrian bridge is the Complejo García Agreda with sports fields. In Senac, a neighbourhood on the south shore of the river accessed by Puente San Martín, is Mirador de Héroes de la Independencia, a park with a lookout and a statue to independence hero Moto Méndez.