THE HIGHEST CITY IN THE WORLDThe city of El Alto (a Spanish word meaning ‘the high place’) is the world’s highest city at 4,150 m above sea level. It is Bolivia’s second biggest city, after Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and has a population of around one million. The South American country also has the world’s highest capital city, La Paz.Strangely, the city of El Alto didn’t even exist until 1903, when the railway passing from Lake Titicaca to La Paz arrived. It has very few historical buildings, unlike the nearby La Paz, which started life 400 years earlier.The first school opened in 1939, mainly for the children of railway workers who lived there. The city grew enormously in the 1950s when it became connected to the water pipes that came under the ground from La Paz. Until then, water had to be brought to El Alto in lorries.The majority of people in El Alto are not of Spanish origin, but are Aymara people, who lived in Bolivia before Europeans arrived. The city’s traffic police officers, are largely Aymara women dressed in traditional brightly-coloured skirts and shirts, which seems an unusual sight to most outsiders.The climate there is cool. Even in summer, the maximum daytime temperature is only 17oC in the warmest month, November. In winter, it’s about 7oC in the coldest month, but it’s much drier than the warmer summers, the driest month being June.For a long time, El Alto was a residential area housing the workers from La Paz, with little industry of its own, but this has changed over the last 20 years or so. The city now even has a special day when they celebrate the date when politicians decided that El Alto should have its own city council (March 6th 1985) and when El Alto became an independent city. 7 Most police officers in El Alto work for the traffic police.