Calle Jaén is a short street — barely a block and a half — but it contains four small museums, all housed in colonial buildings whose interiors have been preserved or restored. The museums are the Museo del Litoral (about Bolivia's loss of its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific, a grievance that has not faded in 140 years), the Museo Casa de Murillo (the house of independence hero Pedro Domingo Murillo, with period furniture and documents), the Museo de Metales Preciosos Precolombinos (pre-Columbian gold and bronze work), and the Museo de Instrumentos Musicales. A single combined ticket admits you to all four. None of them is large, but together they make a morning.
The street itself is the attraction as much as any individual museum. The cobblestones, the scale of the buildings — two storeys, built for a colonial merchant class — and the whitewashed walls with their carved stone doorframes give it a quality that no other part of central La Paz has. It is not preserved as a theme park; people live and work here. But it sits in such marked contrast to the busy streets around it that stepping onto Jaén feels like a genuine displacement in time. Come in the morning, when the light is good and the tourist groups have not yet arrived.