Tunari Mountains

The Tunari Mountains rise above the Cochabamba region of Bolivia, creating a sharp transition between high Andean ground and warmer valleys. Altitude divides the landscape into environments suited to different plants, animals, and forms of labor. Water descending from the heights supports cultivation below, making the mountain watershed important even to communities living far from its exposed ridges.

Across the wider central Bolivian Andes, exchange connected valley agriculture and highland pastoralism. In the Cochabamba valley below Tunari, the Spanish founded the Villa de Oropesa in 1571 and refounded it in 1574. Grain from the valley supplied the growing market of Potosí, tying local agriculture to the colonial mining economy. This is the history of the surrounding valley rather than evidence of particular settlements on the mountain itself.