The Andean highlands hold one of the oldest continuously significant religious landscapes in the Americas. Tiwanaku, on the altiplano near Lake Titicaca, was a ceremonial centre for centuries before the Inca, who incorporated it into their own account of origins: the creator emerged at Titicaca, and the Island of the Sun in the lake was a principal Inca shrine. When the Spanish built the sanctuary of the Virgin of Copacabana on the lakeshore in the sixteenth century they were building on a pilgrimage site that already existed.
The colonial church in Upper Peru ran extirpation of idolatry campaigns, destroying huacas and punishing ritual specialists, and produced instead a Catholicism whose surface is entirely orthodox and whose substrate is not. Potosi is the sharpest illustration. The silver mountain that funded the Spanish empire is worked to this day, and the miners maintain both a Catholic devotion to the Virgen del Socavon above ground and offerings of coca, alcohol and cigarettes to the Tio, the owner of the underground, in a figure kept inside the workings. The two are not felt as a contradiction: the church is for the surface and the Tio for below.
Offerings to the Pachamama are ordinary in construction, mining and agriculture, made through the challa libation and prepared by yatiri specialists. The Oruro Carnival, in which the Diablada dance enacts a moral drama before the Virgin, is inscribed by UNESCO.
Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown quickly among the urban poor of El Alto and the lowland cities, and they are generally the least accommodating of the older practices.