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| Sopocachi’s Avenida 6 de Agosto featuring the Paraguayan embassy building, designed by Gustave Eiffel |
It is July 14 and the night is buzzing. It is, of course, Bastille Day, France’s national day. Dark-haired waitresses dressed in the typical Marseilles costume – a striped sailor’s T-shirt, dark beret and red silk scarves wrapped around their necks – walk from table to table at the local bistro, La Guinguette, parting the smoke of dozens of cigarettes as they serve Pernod. Meanwhile, the melancholy melody of Jacques Brel’s “La Valse à Mille Temps” issues from the speakers.
What could be more French? Not much, except that this is not the Canal de Saint Martin in Paris, or even in its suburbs, by the river Marne, or even in France.
Here, the air is thin and a stunning snow-capped mountain crowns the view. Outside the small, recently opened restaurant runs a cobblestone road, at whose side sits a local woman wearing a bowler hat and thick skirt hawking cigarettes and chewing gum.
Welcome to Sopocachi, the pseudo-French quarter of the Bolivian capital La Paz, 3,600 metres above sea level in the Andes.
“Vive la France, vive la Bolivie!” shouts Ludovic Rapenne, a local resident who hails originally from the mountain region of Belfort, along the French-Swiss border.
“Sopocachi is the land of opportunities now, and not many people know that,” he says while sipping a glass of local red wine.
A chef who has worked in Paris, London and the French Caribbean, Rapenne (also known as “Nomad Chef”) arrived in La Paz five years ago with “only $4,000” in his pocket. Today he owns a classy apart-hotel; he has also just rented an old warehouse to start building three lofts and a cooking school; he is about to acquire another house to turn into a small hotel; and he is thinking of bringing a boulanger colleague of his from Nantes to start his own “boulangerie, along the lines of Paul in Paris or London”.
Here it is quite common for properties to be offered either for sale or rent. The 800 sq metre 1940s building where he offers eight, nicely furnished and decorated apartments – with paintings from local artists for sale – is today worth $200,000. (He started renting it for $870 a month with the condition that it had to be renovated.)
As for the warehouse in which he is developing three classy lofts, the rent he pays is $350 a month under a fixed five-year contract – he is then planning to buy the property for less than $100,000. And on top of that, he is about to seal a $90,000 deal for a 300 sq metre 1950s art deco house to start another guesthouse – but of a “higher level”. (Due to the country’s financial instability, property sale prices in Bolivia, as in most of Latin America, are quoted in dollars.)
“I couldn’t have done this in any other place in the world,” he says. “Sopocachi is cheap, but not only that: it is also charming, homey, bohemian, with great architecture, with an increasingly big expat community and it also attracts nice tourists. It is just perfect.”
Sopocachi, just south of the centre of La Paz, is the only really international hub in Bolivia where French, British, Americans, Brazilians, Argentines and other nationalities can meet. Diplomats, non-governmental organisation workers, journalists and writers all jump the puddles that lie between the nice (and cheap) local cafés and restaurants and buy their groceries from colourful stalls run by indigenous women.
For Brenda Pakos, general manager of Vip Bienes Raíces, an estate agency that caters to Bolivians as well as “many foreigners”, the area is ripe for expansion, thanks to the “great mix of offices and residential properties”.
This is also because La Paz as a whole is enjoying a construction boom, with more than 400 buildings under construction in several neighbourhoods. This includes Sopocachi, where, Pakos says, the cost per sq metre of new developments is about $700. “Average prices are about $70,000 for a resale and $90,000 for a new property of about 130 sq metres,” she says.
Rapenne is not the only Frenchman to have found his niche in Sopocachi. His compatriot and former colleague Bernard Arduca lives round the corner and owns La Paz’s finest restaurant, La Comédie. Arduca moved from Antananarivo in Madagascar because he was “tired of Africa”, closing the doors of a restaurant near the Indian Ocean to set up shop in the world’s highest capital city.
“When I first came to La Paz, back in 2001, I freaked out a bit. Then I returned in 2003, fell in love with Sopocachi and opened the restaurant,” he says.
He paid $160,000 for the 775 sq metre 1940s ship-shaped property that today houses the restaurant and five apartments. “There was not much around back then but I knew this was the right spot. Sopocachi is a village inside a city, where charme and bohème set foot”, he says. “Try the crème brûlée. Despite the altitude, it tastes just like in France.”
Other French people have also fallen for the charms of Sopocachi. Patrick Vanier is an award-winning French filmmaker who has spent years between Delhi, Guatemala City and Paris. Three years ago he decided to visit Bolivia to make a film about the rise of the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.
“I came first in late 2005 to shoot. Then I came back in late in 2006 and decided I wanted to stay,” he says. “I’ve fallen in love with a Bolivian and we got a 75 sq metre flat here for $47,000. You cannot beat that, especially when I think of Paris’s prices. Here, the light is amazing and I just go down in the elevator and I have great fruit, nice meat, bookstores, cafés, great friends, and I am close to the town centre. Everything and everybody is around.”
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| Views from the Montículo lookout point |
Most of the old houses along Sopocachi’s two main avenues, Arce and 6 de Agosto, have recently been declared national heritage sites. They are available for purchase but only on the condition that the original façades are kept intact.
Some of the area’s old French-style houses (though mixed with balustrades that echo the Spanish colonial style) reflect its aristocratic past. The Paraguayan embassy, for example, is located in the remains of a house designed by Gustave Eiffel, creator of the eponymous tower.
In Eiffel’s time, Sopocachi was exclusively for whites, before the mixed-race and indigenous population started to arrive. It is now a vibrant melting pot where upmarket stores rub shoulders with traditional Andean street stalls selling everything from bootleg DVDs to pungent sausages.
During the day those stalls are passed by workers heading towards corporate headquarters, banks, offices, embassies, ministries, aid agencies and art galleries, for Sopocachi is a rather posh area – at least by the standards of one of South America’s poorest countries.
At night, restaurants, pubs, lounges and discos open up along its nicely lit cobblestoned streets. Nowhere else in La Paz is there such a concentration of eating places and watering holes. Occasionally, too, street acrobats emerge to entertain the revellers. Above all, it is safe by Latin American standards – a fact reflected by the absence of the high fences and security walls typical in this continent.
The construction boom – coupled with big projects timed to celebrate this year’s bicentenary of Bolivia’s independence from Spain – has turned La Paz upside-down. It is hard to match the chaos of the traffic (one odd by-product of which is unemployed youngsters dressed as zebras hired to control traffic) but Sopocachi itself is like a calm oasis amid the mayhem. This perhaps explains why it counts Morales, his vice-president Alvaro García Linera, and several other cabinet members among its residents.
Because of its indigenous majority, La Paz and its neglected satellite city, El Alto located on the Andean plateau, are known to be strongholds for Morales, who came to power three years ago. The elevation to the presidency of an indigenous Aymara Indian who wants redistribution of wealth and more power for indigenous people has not only raised eyebrows locally, it has also attracted a wave of “curious” foreigners.
Rapenne is among those who believe that the arrival of Morales has been beneficial to Sopocachi. “Evo is an attractive and colourful character,” he says. “Many foreigners arrived in Bolivia after he came to power. And many decided to stay, from white-glove communists, to academics, to writers, to photographers, to aid workers. Most of them chose Sopocachi as their home and the choice is a good one. Vive Sopocachi!”
Vip Bienes Raices, tel +591 279-7789, www.vipbienesraices.com
Andres Schipani is the FT’s Bolivia correspondent
