Bolivia Highlights

The arrival hub and the acclimatisation stop - treat these two nights as medical, not optional. La Paz is built into a canyon, so the city's own geography does the sightseeing for you: ride the Mi Teleférico cable-car network (genuine public transport that happens to be the best city view in South America) between the bowl and El Alto on the rim. The Witches' Market, the Valle de la Luna badlands and a day of doing very little all fit here.

Skip / overrated: Don't book the Death Road ride for your first full day - it starts near 4,650m and drops thousands of metres, and doing it before you've acclimatised is how people end the trip early. If you want it, put it after Titicaca.

The Bolivian shore of the lake, and a quieter, more devotional proposition than the Peruvian side: Copacabana's basilica draws pilgrims who come to have their vehicles blessed, and Isla del Sol - the island the Inca called the birthplace of the sun - is walkable, roadless and worth an overnight rather than a day boat. Sleeping on the island, at altitude, with no traffic, is the memory people keep.

Skip / overrated: Copacabana town itself is a base, not a destination - one night there and one on Isla del Sol beats two in town.

The reason most people come to Bolivia, and three nights is the honest number - the salar itself is a day, but the standard southwest circuit continues past it into the Eduardo Avaroa reserve: coloured lagoons, flamingos, geysers and the Siloli desert, sleeping in basic refuges at serious altitude. Incahuasi, the cactus-covered island in the middle of the flats, is the classic dry-season stop.

Skip / overrated: Uyuni the town is a dusty transit point with nothing to detain you; it exists to launch tours. Do not pick your operator on price alone - the southwest circuit is long-distance driving on remote tracks, and the cheapest operators have a documented history of exhausted or drinking drivers. Ask directly about driver rotation and read recent reviews, not the wall of laminated photos.

Once one of the richest cities on earth and now among the highest, Potosí is a single, heavy night: Cerro Rico, the silver mountain that bankrolled the Spanish empire and consumed an appalling number of Indigenous and enslaved African lives, still looms over a colonial centre of churches and the Casa Nacional de la Moneda mint. It is the most historically serious stop on the route.

Skip / overrated: Be clear-eyed about the working-mine tours: Cerro Rico is a still-active cooperative mine with unstable shafts, silica dust and dynamite, and the miners' life expectancy is short. Some travelers find the visit a genuine, miner-guided education; others find it tourism inside someone's dangerous workplace. If you go, go with a cooperative-run outfit that employs ex-miners. If that sits wrong, the Casa de la Moneda tells the same story without the ethical bill - and Potosí at 4,000m is a rough place to spend a day underground anyway.

The constitutional capital and the exhale at the end of the route - whitewashed, UNESCO-listed, full of students, and at roughly 2,750m the first place your body stops negotiating. Good food, warm afternoons, a dinosaur trackway at Cal Orck'o, and the best-value Spanish schools in South America, which is why travelers who intended three nights here stay three weeks. It's also the cleanest place to end the trip, with flights back to La Paz.

Eat: Sucre is where the food gets good after the altiplano: the central market's fruit-juice counters and salteña stalls at mid-morning are the local ritual, not a tourist one.