Bless Your Car at Copacabana Cathedral

Copacabana, on the shores of glittering Lake Titicaca, is the gracious entry point for most travelers entering Bolivia from adventures in Peru. It’s a beautiful town, not for its architecture or form as much for the astounding grace and variety of the natural beauty that surrounds it. Even in one of its (these days, frequent) rainstorms, Copacabana seems to have an impermeable air of peace and quiet. Standing a mile outside the city at the hillside site of an Incan bath, a friend remarked that we should try to remember this view—the flat blue-silver mirror of the lake, the marshy patchwork of fields, and the thumbprint of the small town pressed between its two great waterside hills—as within a decade, he predicted, it’d all be gone. Indeed, Copacabana has all the growing pains of a town at the end of childhood. New construction adds layers to every existent rooftop and open site, and a map pinpoints, in a town of only a few hundred people, over thirty hostels and hotels.

Most of the tourism is concentrated by the waterfront, particularly on Calle 6 de Augusto. The strip, which runs perpendicular to the water, is lined with internet cafes and restaurants touting vegetarian menus. At the top of the street, Bolivians gather in the plaza around pushcarts with steaming tin bowls of cerviche. At the shoreline, girls hold out gutted raw trout as advertisement for each lakeside kiosk. In between, hundreds of beautiful hippies from Chile and Argentina and Brazil wander up and down the quarter-mile slope, trying on felt hats, stone jewelry, and alpaca wool sweaters stitched with llamas.

In my own hours of walking, I found the fields surrounding “Copa” to be my favorite spot. There, where the streets lose their cobblestones to red earth, puddles gather in deep tire tracks and water rushes through the canals lining fields of potatoes and coca plants. There are fields, too, of swaying blue and purple lupin flowers, grown both for their edible seed pods and to enrich the soil with their leguminous properties. Sheep mill about the landscape like bits of cotton blown by the breezes off the lake. Nothing was more pleasurable about Copacabana than its proximity to long, flat stretches of fields, the high likelihood of a piglet snuffling about in the earth, or passing, in silhouette against the gently rippling waters of Lake Titicaca, the large, hulking cows with blond hair as soft and velvety in appearance as the hills that surrounded the city.

Besides my own spiritual feelings for its outlying fields, the city of Copacabana is also a vital religious site for Bolivians. Ascending the hill flanking the city is one famous pilgrimage. Twelve stone crucifixes mark climbing the hillside mark the Stations of the Cross. At each, you have the opportunity to make a prayer, and if, throwing a pebble at the cross’s base, the stone sticks, your prayer will be heard. A second popular pilgrimage focuses on beautiful Cathedral of Copacabana. With its white walls and the ornate tile designs on its roof, it seems to have been taken directly from Southern California, built with the simplified influence of missionary Spain. At ten o’clock every morning, large cars line up, ready to be blessed by the parish priest at the cost of a hundred Bolivianos (about twelve US dollars, a princely sum), their hoods and tailgates decorated with carefully arranged bouquets of flowers, and miniature canoes of reeds. Families throw petals like confetti, adjusting long streamers across their SUV like icing on a cake. After the blessing, the engine of each car gets a splash of Holy Water, the priest using a fake rose to sprinkle it from a decanter. Champagne and beer are sprayed all over the hood for good measure. Then, with a sound like cellophane crumpling, a round of firecrackers is set off in front of each car.

I spent a week in Copa, working on this and that. Even when the town was struck by a hailstorm, with ice the size of beetles raining furiously from the sky, I felt as though I’d yet to find a prettier place in Bolivia. Vamos a ver.

Thursday January 24th, 2008 in ...in action! | No comments »