The Architecture of Contradiction — The Cholets of El Alto, La Paz
In one of the highest cities in the world, a self-taught Aymara architect decided that his community deserved something extraordinary — and built it anyway.
The first time you see a Cholet, you don’t quite believe it. Rising out of a landscape of bare brick and half-built walls, there it is — six, seven, eight floors of geometric brilliance, covered in bold colour and Aymara pattern, with a ballroom on the top floor and a view of the Andes. It looks like someone took the visual language of an ancient civilisation and decided to make it loud, unapologetic, and impossible to ignore.
That’s exactly what they did.
The Cholets are the work of Freddy Mamani Silvestre, an Aymara architect from El Alto who began designing them in the early 2000s with no formal architectural training beyond technical school. The word “cholet” is itself a reclamation — a fusion of “cholo,” once a slur used against Indigenous Bolivians, and “chalet,” the aspirational European home. Mamani took both words and built something neither could contain.
From the outside, a Cholet reads as spectacle. From the inside, it’s deeply functional. The ground floor is typically a commercial space — a shop, a garage, a market stall. The middle floors are rented apartments. The upper floors belong to the owner’s family. And at the very top, almost always, is the salón de eventos — a vast, mirrored ballroom where weddings, quinceañeras, and community celebrations happen on a scale that would embarrass most five-star hotels.
This is the part that gets left out of the architectural press coverage. The Cholets are not vanity projects. They are economic engines, built by Aymara entrepreneurs who made their money in trade and decided to invest it back into their community in the most visible way possible. The architecture is the statement, but the function is the foundation.
Within the Aymara community, a Cholet is also a status symbol. Building one signals that you made it — that the money earned through decades of trade and hustle has been converted into something permanent and visible. In a community that was systematically excluded from the formal economy, that kind of architectural statement carries a weight that goes far beyond aesthetics. A Cholet is how you show your neighbours, and the city below, exactly where you stand.
El Alto has started appearing on travel itineraries — and the Cholets are usually why. Tour operators run “Cholet tours” out of La Paz, often framed as architectural curiosities, hidden gems, something off the beaten path. The images travel well on Instagram. The colours pop. The contrast with the surrounding landscape makes for a striking photograph.
Photo: Lobo730, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Olga Lidia Paredes Alcoreza / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo: Tasmita Gz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Jhulis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What those tours rarely ask is why El Alto needed this kind of architecture in the first place. The Cholets get aestheticised — celebrated for their visual language while the social and political context that produced them gets quietly cropped out of frame.
El Alto sits at over 4,000 metres above sea level, directly above La Paz. It is one of the highest cities in the world, and one of the most densely populated in Bolivia. It was formally recognized as a city only in 1985 — before that, it was considered a periphery of La Paz, a place where migrants from the altiplano settled when they came looking for work and found only the edges of someone else’s city.
For decades, El Alto was synonymous with poverty, danger, and neglect. Residents of La Paz — the lower city, the colonial city, the city with the ministries and the embassies — would describe it with a mixture of fear and indifference. It was the place you drove through, not to.
The Cholets didn’t change that perception overnight. But they made it harder to sustain. You cannot look at a Freddy Mamani building and tell yourself there is nothing happening here.
I grew up hearing about El Alto the way most people from La Paz do — as a warning. A place you move through quickly, where you keep your phone in your pocket and your eyes open. That reputation isn’t invented. But what our parents' version of the story leaves out is everything else: the market culture, the music, the food, the community logic that holds a city of millions together without much help from anyone above it. I lived there long enough to understand that El Alto doesn’t need you to feel comfortable. It just needs you to pay attention.
What makes the Cholets genuinely striking is what surrounds them. El Alto is still largely a city of bare brick — walls without plaster, buildings that look perpetually mid-construction. This is partly economic: in Bolivia, an unfinished building is taxed less, so many families build one floor at a time and leave the rebar reaching upward.
The Cholets sit among all of this fully finished, fully rendered, impossible to miss. And if you look closely at the facade, you might find Aymara geometric patterns sitting next to a Spiderman mural or a Transformers motif — global pop culture absorbed and redecorated on entirely Aymara terms. Nobody asked for permission. Nobody needed to.
Photo: Leislin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Estrellaef, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: VelascoMamani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
And in the middle of this immense city: there's a building that looks like a ceremony. Turquoise and gold. Geometric and monumental.
That contrast is the whole point. The Cholets do not pretend the surrounding poverty doesn’t exist. They insist that beauty belongs here anyway — that the people who built this city from nothing have every right to imagine something extraordinary rising out of it.
That’s more than a design choice. That’s a political statement made in concrete and colour.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether a building can change how a city sees itself — it’s what it means when a community decides to stop waiting for permission to be seen.
Written by Valeria Lupo
Continue the Journey!
Exhibitions:
Collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (Paris, France)
Tours:
Cholets – Tour de la nueva arquitectura Andina
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