La Paz, Bolivia's capital of cool

Alarcón divides his time between La Paz and Berlin, where he is about to launch a wine bar in boho Prenzlauer Berg. His baristas wear tight T-shirts and trilbies, and turn out 34 different kinds of coffee, including slow-macerated Japanese brews. But I'm not here for hipster coffee. I'm here for psychogeography, and my fellow cortado sipper is an expert. Carlos Mesa, who was briefly Bolivia's president between 2003 and 2005, is also one of its foremost writers. I ask him what it means to live in the world's highest capital city.

'La Paz and the mountains are a single thing, they're inseparable,' he says. 'We're in the shadow of Illimani, one of the most beautiful mountains in the world - and when we are away we think only of that. Indigenous culture is not something from the past. People still believe the mountains are apus, or protective spirits.'

I remark that, for me, even more striking than the dramatic mountain setting is the way La Paz feels enclosed, like a huge bowl. 'Yes, and because of that we are frightened of empty, wide-open spaces,' he says. 'A paceño out on the plains feels terror.'

Mesa is no fan of Evo Morales, South America's first indigenous president who took his seat in 2006. He calls him a pure capitalist and a shameful self-mythologiser. But despite being a political opponent, Mesa acknowledges that Evo (he is often called affectionately by his first name) has been good for La Paz. 'There's been rivalry from the commercial hub Santa Cruz in the lowlands for years, and from [constitutional capital] Sucre - as well as moves to divide the country,' he explains. 'When Evo came to power, he was quick to reassert La Paz's status as capital. This, and the pro-indigenous politics, has united the city and given it new confidence.'

After recent visits to all the big cities on this continent, I'd say La Paz is changing faster than any other. Its renaissance comes after decades of sleepy stagnation. In Zona Sur (the southside), a residential and commercial district which is lower and a few degrees warmer than the historic centre, the city's first smart boutique hotel, Atix, has just opened: its interiors built from native wood and comanche stone, its walls hung with works by Bolivia's best-known artist, Gastón Ugalde. The striking parallelogram-shaped tower is the result of a collaboration with New York design studio Narofsky Architecture. 'We're the new face of Bolivian hospitality,' says owner Mariel Salinas. 'Our aim is to share our cultural wealth with the rest of the world.' The cool cocktails made from singani and other native firewaters that are served in the bar, +591 (Bolivia's phone code), were created by David Romero, a former mixologist at Lima's award-winning Central, and Ona restaurant serves sublime Andean food.

That said, the competition in the barrio is fierce. Around the corner is Gustu, a restaurant opened by Claus Meyer, co-founder of Copenhagen's two-Michelin-starred Noma and the man credited with setting off the Scandi food revolution a decade ago. 'He was looking for a country with amazing produce but no real cuisine,' says Surnaya Prado of Gustu. 'He had made a shortlist of four, but he came to Bolivia first, saw it had everything he required and his journey ended here.' The lofty dining space, decorated in bright textiles, masks and recycled vintage furniture, looks almost as gorgeous as the food served by chef Kamilla Seidler and her youthful team (Gustu is also a training academy). Lunch is a seven-course sampler, including llama tartare, Amazonian sorubim fish with bananas and chilli, and a sorbet of tumbo fruit with gin. Denmark suddenly seems a bit last century.

At the neighbourhood's most stylish home-grown shop, Walisuma, owner Patricia Rodríguez shows me $1,000 vicuña wool scarves, baby-soft llama-hide bags, kitchenwares made from recycled Bolivian rosewood, and floaty dresses in muted colours that have an ethnic feel but avoid the crude iconography of tourist clobber.

'We use coca leaves, plants and herbs in our natural dyes,' says Rodríguez. 'We have modernised the motifs so the fabrics denote the region but are fashionable. That's what our clients want.'

Zona Sur has cutesy coffee shops, Asian-fusion restaurants, private art galleries and flagships of upmarket Italian fashion brands. But it also has a proper food market where everyone seems to be chinwagging as they pick up tropical fruit, high-plains vegetables, quinoa and other now-cool superfoods such as maca and vitamin-C-rich camu camu. It also has a very good old-school pie shop, Salteñas Potosina. The tasty snack is laced with chilli. A small group of local food historians have started a campaign to prove chillis originally came from upland Bolivia. It's time, they say, to reclaim their gastronomic gift to the world.

I take a cable-car to the hilltop suburb of Sopocachi. The new network of aerial public transport has been opening in stages since May 2014. Three lines currently operate, with seven more under construction. The Austrian-built system has halved the commute for suburbanites. It gives me a chance to see the city beyond Zona Sur.

While chatting to a friendly fellow passenger, I look down over school playgrounds full of children in smart red uniforms, homes with pools, gardens and pedigree dogs, football stadia, an Olympic swimming pool, a church for every parish, office blocks, and thousands of residential towers built in orange brick, their flat roofs a jumble of cables and antennae. Cars, cabs and buses race along winding ribbons of expressway. Every narrow pavement is filled with walkers, workers, students, all dashing hither and thither. Again, I have that impression that life in La Paz is centripetal, arrowing inwards but with nowhere to come to rest.

Sopocachi is a liminal zone - falling between the business-minded south and old centre. It looks faintly European and is as close as La Paz gets to laid-back. A few minutes' walk from the cable-car station is a staircase up to the Montículo, a neat little park with cypress trees, a marble fountain of Neptune and a walled-in viewpoint. I can hear the muffled sound of city traffic. A cobbled street leads away from here. I meander without a plan. If I get lost, I'll look for the peak of Illimani and reset my compass.

Like any bohemian quarter, by day Sopocachi feels slumberous, reflective. I see lots of street signs for dive bars, clubs, pool halls and restaurants that only open after dark. But there are also bookshops and cultural centres and I make a stop at the new Salar Gallery, where the artist Ugalde is displaying his ultra-saturated photographs of Bolivia's Uyuni salt lake. 'It's the whiteness,' he says, of his obsession with the mineral. 'It makes me think of death, which is so peaceful.' But he's sipping a can of beer and grinning as he says it. Ambivalent, self-deprecating and with a flair for Pop-style art, Ugalde is sometimes nicknamed the Andean Warhol. 'Tourism brought hotels and restaurants, and now the gastronomy will bring the kind of people who are collectors,' he says. 'It's a good time to be in Bolivia.'

I amble on, enjoying the relative calm of this western flank of the city, until I arrive at the Cementerio General, the main necropolis. Death here seems to be anything but peaceful. It is the Day of the Dead and all around me there is a commotion of mourners en route to tombs to recite prayers, picking up wreaths from the flower market at the gate, stopping by ice-cream parlours to buy cones - it's traditional to enjoy something sweet after shedding bitter tears. The Aymara belief system holds that dead relatives are on a three-year journey to reincarnation. Thus mourners wail on the first Day of the Dead, weep politely on the second and by the third are eating ice cream.

I make my way across to the old city, passing some of the guidebook favourites: the Witches' Market where the cholas sell herbs, potions and dried llama foetuses; calle Jaén, probably La Paz's oldest street and certainly the prettiest with its cobblestones and shady patios; Lanza market, where tiny restaurants are full of diners bent over steaming bowls of broth, rolls stuffed with spicy sausages and immense fruit cocktails. Cumbia music blasts out. Pungent aromas of spices, papaya and pineapple waft along the walkways. This is as traditional a place as anywhere in the city, yet even here, a new scheme known as Suma Phayata ('well-cooked' in Aymara) is promoting food hygiene so visitors can go on a street-snack crawl knowing everything they eat is safe.

My lunch pit stop is Ali Pacha, one of the most progressive restaurants in South America. After training at London's Cordon Bleu school and working in Gustu, owner Sebastian Quiroga was all set to pursue an ordinary jobbing-chef's career when he saw a film about animal welfare and had an epiphany - he decided La Paz needed a vegan restaurant.

'It seems radical, but so does being a chef here,' he said. 'My parents wanted me to become a lawyer, a professional. They sent me to Exeter University but I didn't like it. I knew I wanted to cook.'

The lunchtime menu at Ali Pacha features roots and shoots, flowers and fruits: all exquisite to look at and thrilling to taste. I have crispy palm hearts, freshly whipped coconut butter, an ash made from beetroot, sweet quinoa (used as a sort of tofu) and ice cream made with cupuaçu from the rainforest.

'It's not unrealistic to think of our native cuisine as largely vegan,' he says. 'Before cattle and sheep were introduced, the Aymara would have eaten very little meat. Theirs was a diet of vegetables, pulses and grains.'

Quiroga, like everyone I've met in La Paz, is ambitious, hopeful, chatty and curious. Lots of these would-be movers and shakers work, or have worked, with one another; it's a small, close-knit community. This new generation of paceños is transforming the long-ignored city.

To catch your breath in La Paz you sometimes, unusually, have to go even higher. The cable-car ride up to El Alto, the sometime suburb that has become La Paz's sister city, is steep and dramatic. From the top - I'm at 4,100 metres now - I can at last take in the sweep of the Bolivian capital. The crater in which La Paz sits looks like it has been created by an asteroid collision - it is in fact a river canyon - and the city, too, has the look of something not quite intentional. Illimani acts like a purifying force, a pristine hulk of black mountain with its white summit, splitting the clouds and protecting this messy, crazy, breathtaking city.

I turn to enter El Alto, another million souls spread over the dusty Andean altiplano. Most visitors have to pass through because it's where the airport is located, but in recent years some have lingered awhile to see one of the oddest artistic movements of our times.

El Alto native Freddy Mamani, a former mason, has been giving its otherwise monotone sprawl an injection of colour with some 60 houses inspired partly by native Aymara architecture, but also by festive chola clothing and - most bizarrely - the Transformer cartoon-toy franchise. The buildings are known as cholets (from chola and chalet); the standard format is a multi-storey tower with retail space on the ground floor, a party venue on the first and second, a few floors of apartments to rent and, on top of it all, a chalet-like house for the owner.

With a taxi driver, I tour the city and see a few of these cholets. They stand out for their not-quite-primary colours, Wurlitzer-like lines, mirror-glass windows and garish murals. We pull over at a vaguely ship-shaped building called Crucero del Sur. The interior is an acid trip of chartreuse, mustard and carrot-orange. As a party venue, it's indisputably fun - a mix of Willy Wonka, Gaudí, and Hansel and Gretel. As architecture, it's an over-the-top cathedral of dubious taste for El Alto's nouveau riche.

On the roof of the world, like a summiting mountaineer, I climb seven floors and come out onto a bare terrace. Before me is El Alto's vastness, its endless rows of drab, jerry-built towers eventually merging with the parched high plain. At the very edge of this are the Andes, golden in the lowering sun, and a huge blue sky. I'm breathless again, but at least I'm standing still. From somewhere behind me and far below comes a faint hum: La Paz, tireless and unstoppable on its way to a new future.

Aracari (+44 20 7097 1750) offers a five-day trip to La Paz from £1,272 per person, including stays at Atix and Casa Grande hotels, private guided tours and transfers. British Airways (+44 844 493 0787) flies from London Gatwick to La Paz via Lima.

This feature first appeared in Condé Nast Traveller March 2017

Road tripping in Bolivia

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