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The mountain
Chacaltaya is a mountain in the Cordillera Real, a little over thirty kilometres from La Paz. It had the highest ski run in the world, lost its glacier in 2009 and has sustained uninterrupted scientific measurements since 1942. Before telling its story, it is worth understanding the place: altitude is not a picturesque detail — it is the reason for everything else.
Three things at once, and all three matter for the candidacy: an exceptional landform, an area that has been protected for eighty years and a working scientific facility.
In September 1942 an exiled Spanish meteorologist, Ismael Escobar, set up a station that measured solar radiation at 5,200 metres. That same year a supreme decree declared the Andean group of Huayna Potosí – Chacaltaya – Laguna Milluni a National Park. The Laboratory was not built in spite of the protection regime, but within it — a detail that proves decisive before UNESCO.
Read milestone 01 →Why 5,200 metres change the physics: a much shorter column of air overhead, and therefore particles that, at sea level, would already have decayed. The table of altitudes for each facility — Laboratory, GAW station, LAGO, summit — has yet to be settled, with a source for every figure. ⚠
The road from La Paz, access conditions, the altitude and its risks, and the visiting arrangements for a scientific facility in operation. Requires prior agreement with the Laboratorio de Física de la Atmósfera (Atmospheric Physics Laboratory). ⚠
The mountain is not merely the site of the Laboratory: it is a protected area, a vanished glacier and a high-altitude community. All of this is part of the property being proposed.
Supreme Decree of 4 July 1942, declaring the Andean group of Huayna Potosí – Chacaltaya – Laguna Milluni a National Park. Facsimile, transcription and archival record. It is the oldest protection document in the nomination dossier.
See the document (in Spanish) → Climate The glacier that disappearedChacaltaya had the highest ski run in the world. In 2009 the glacier vanished, decades earlier than predicted. The same mountain that lost it now hosts a global atmospheric monitoring station: it measures the very process that transformed it.
Read milestone 09 →Who lives and works around the mountain, what uses coexist with the scientific facility and how the relationship between public access and the quality of the air being measured is resolved. This is a real tension that the dossier must address, not evade. ⚠
Photographs of the glacier, the ski run, the road or the facilities from any period. A pair of images with the same framing, then and now, is the most eloquent argument this site can offer.
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