El Alto sits on the flat altiplano at around 4,000 metres, directly above and physically separate from La Paz in the canyon below. It is not a neighbourhood of La Paz — it is its own city, with its own mayor and its own politics — but the two are economically and socially inseparable. El Alto is where La Paz's airport is located, where the teleférico cables terminate, and where a large proportion of the goods that La Paz consumes originates. It grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s as rural Aymara families moved in from the altiplano, and it retains a strongly Aymara character that distinguishes it from the more mestizo city below.
For visitors, El Alto offers three things that La Paz itself doesn't: the Feria 16 de Julio market on Thursdays and Sundays, the cholet architecture of Freddy Mamani Silvestre, and an unobstructed view back down into the canyon that contains La Paz — a view that makes clear, in a way that no map does, how extraordinary the city's physical situation is. The teleférico (cable car system) makes El Alto easily accessible from the city below; the ride up takes about fifteen minutes and the view on the way is worth the fare by itself. El Alto can feel bleak in the wrong weather — flat, exposed, dusty in the dry season — but it is genuine, unmediated, and interesting in ways that the tourist-facing parts of La Paz are not.