Discover Santa Cruz de la Sierra

Santa Cruz de la Sierra offers a range of starting points for planning a trip: urban meeting places, cultural sites and nature at different scales. Plaza de Armas, La Recova, Altar Papal and Manzana Uno represent different aspects of city life. Curichi La Madre is a municipal protected area in Santa Cruz de la Sierra; Lomas de Arena lies in the wider regional area. The broader destination of Santa Cruz adds a perspective on expansive landscapes and cultural contexts.

Squares, Remembrance and Art

Plaza de Armas continues to serve locals as a central meeting place and place to relax. Altar Papal offers a different focus: it commemorates the Pope’s visit to Santa Cruz de la Sierra and has since been used for cultural and religious activities. Together, these places show two different connections to the city’s public life.

Manzana Uno promotes Arte en la Plaza, a public space next to the gallery. Photo exhibitions or reproductions of paintings are displayed there. This adds a distinct artistic connection to the commemoration and cultural and religious use of Altar Papal: the presentation of photographs or painted art in an adjacent public space.

La Recova offers a culinary attraction: visitors can sample typical masitas there. If you’re lucky, you may occasionally hear a banda or tamborita playing cheerful eastern Bolivian music. The music is an occasional possibility, not a regular or guaranteed program. So when visiting La Recova, typical masitas are something visitors can enjoy, while encountering music is not something that can be planned with certainty.

Nature in and around Santa Cruz de la Sierra

Curichi La Madre is a municipal protected area for ecological conservation in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Lomas de Arena, in the wider regional area of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 12 kilometers southeast of the city center, offers a different connection to nature. Its features include vegetation-free sand dunes and seasonal lagoons; numerous birds can be observed there. While Curichi La Madre is a municipal protected area within the city, the focus at Lomas is on dunes, lagoons and birdwatching.

Landscapes and culture in the broader destination of Santa Cruz

The Valles Cruceños cover approximately 13,000 square kilometers and lie at elevations between 1,200 and 2,000 meters. They include the provinces of Florida, Vallegrande and Caballero in the Department of Santa Cruz. Their size and elevation describe this regional area within the broader destination of Santa Cruz, not individual places in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

The Valles Cruceños are home to inter-Andean dry forest, Bolivian-Tucuman forest, Serrano Chaco, subtropical rainforest and Puna vegetation. The Área Protegida de los Valles Cruceños is reported to have 374 bird species, including the endemic red-fronted macaw and the Andean condor; this number may change as further research is conducted.

Noel Kempff Mercado National Park is also part of the broader destination of Santa Cruz. Viable populations of numerous globally endangered or threatened vertebrate species live there. The park’s habitats include evergreen rainforests, palm forests, Cerrado, swamps, savannas, gallery forests and semievergreen dry forests. The Valles Cruceños and the national park therefore represent regional nature themes that differ from the urban and nearby points of interest mentioned above.

The Chiquitano culture is part of the broader destination of Santa Cruz’s cultural context. It developed mainly in Chiquitanía in the Department of Santa Cruz and combines the traditions of the Indigenous Chiquitano people with Jesuit influence, introduced in the 17th and 18th centuries.

If you’re looking for hotels in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, distinguishing between urban points of interest and the broader destination can help you identify your travel interests. This lets you define your search focus based on whether places and themes in the city or regional landscapes and culture are your priority.

Discover more destinations: Jorochito

For the broader travel overview: Andrés Ibáñez.