La Paz has a fine cathedral and four churches, four convents, a college, three nunneries, and an hospital, and contains 20,000 inhabitants, who are chiefly engaged in trading in Paraguay tea. A late traveller represents it to be an elegant and clean place.
It is a bishop's see, whose revenues are very considerable.
This city had formerly the five following provinces or districts under its jurisdiction, and its bishop still holds ecclesiastical sway over them; viz. Omasuyos, Pacages, Laricaxas, Chucuito and Paucarcolla.
The district of Omasuyos begins at the gates of La Paz, and extends 20 leagues, being bounded on the west by lake Chucuito or Titicaca. Its climate is very cold, so that it produces little corn; but its pastures feed a great number of cattle; and it has four gold mines. It is chiefly inhabited by Indians. Near the borders of this province is the town or village of Tiahanuaco, in which are colossal pyramids and gigantic figures cut out of stone; and these, though much injured by the weather, are highly singular, and are conjectured to have existed before the times of the Peruvian Incas. This place is thirty-six miles north-west of La Paz, in south latitude 17° 17' and very near the south-east coast of lake Titicaca.
Unfortunately no traveller has given a detailed account of these images, which are supposed to be the most ancient and singular in America.
Pacajes is bounded on the north by Chucuito and the great lake; north-east, by Omasuyos; east, by La Paz and Sicasica; south, by Oruro, Paria and Carangas, and south-west and west, by the Peruvian province of Arica, which is separated from it by the lofty chain of the Andes.
Its length from the bridge over the river Desaguadaro, which divides it from Chucuito to the province of Paria, is fifty-six leagues, and its greatest width forty. From the neighbourhood of the Andes, its climate is cold, and its soil not very productive. Its inhabitants are dispersed in small settlements, and consist chiefly of Indians, who are employed in tending cattle and sheep, with which it abounds.
There were formerly several mines of silver and emeralds, but they are not worked at present. A mine of talc supplies the whole of Peru with plates of that substance to serve instead of window glass for the churches and houses.
Including Tiahanuaco, there are fifteen settlements in Pacajes, which has a capital of the same name, eighty miles south-west of La Paz, in a variable climate, and whose chief commerce consists in the sale of cattle to the neighbouring towns.
Laricaxas, north of La Paz, is a district which extends 240 miles from east to west, and 75 from north to south; it bounds that of Carabaya on the north, and most of its products are the same as those in that province. It contains many gold mines, the metal found in which is of a superior fineness, and four of these mines are in work. The mountain of Sunchuli in this province is celebrated as having been the situation of a gold mine which was discovered in 1709, and was worked with immense profit till 1756, when it was inundated by a spring which suddenly burst in it, and all attempts to get the water under have since proved in vain.