The cholets of El Alto are the most original architectural development in South America in the last twenty years, and almost nobody outside Bolivia knew they existed until relatively recently. Freddy Mamani Silvestre built the first one around 2005, a multi-storey building for a wealthy El Alto merchant that incorporated the bold geometric patterns of Tiwanaku stonework into the facade, painted in colours — electric turquoise, deep pink, lime yellow — that have no precedent in conventional architecture. The ground floor is typically a ballroom for hire; the upper floors contain apartments or offices; the owner lives at the top. The pattern has been copied by other builders across El Alto, but Mamani's originals are distinguishable by their more precise detailing and more audacious colour.
To see the best examples, take the Línea Roja teleférico from the Cementerio station up to El Alto and walk the streets around Avenida Cívica and the surrounding residential blocks. A half-day is enough to see a dozen or more. Mamani has an office in El Alto and occasionally gives tours himself; the New York Times and the BBC both profiled him around 2018, which increased the trickle of architectural tourists considerably. The buildings look best in the morning light, when the shadows on the geometric reliefs are sharpest. They are genuinely unlike anything else in the world.