Bolivia lies in the middle of South America and has no coast. The west is high country: two ranges of the Andes with the Altiplano, a vast cold plateau, between them. Here are Lake Titicaca, which Bolivia shares with Peru, and the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. The east and north, about two thirds of the country, are warm lowlands of savanna and Amazon rainforest.
Bolivia is one of the few countries with two capital cities, and it helps to know the difference. Sucre is the capital named in the constitution and the home of the Supreme Court. La Paz is the seat of government, where the president, the parliament and the electoral authority work. The largest city of all is a third one, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in the tropical east.
Memories fade faster than photos. Ask these over a meal or a phone call, and write the answers down.
The high plateau around Lake Titicaca was home to the Tiwanaku culture more than a thousand years ago, and later became part of the Inca Empire. The Spanish arrived in the 1530s and found one of the richest silver mountains in the world at Potosí. Known in colonial times as Charcas or Upper Peru, the country became independent in 1825. In the century that followed, wars with its neighbours cost Bolivia its coast and large areas of land.
From about AD 600, Tiwanaku, near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, grew into a city with stone temples and platforms. It was the centre of a culture whose influence reached into today's Peru and Chile, fed by farmers who grew crops on raised fields.
Between 1438 and 1527, the Inca Empire expanded from its capital, Cusco, and took control of much of what is now the Bolivian Andes. The eastern lowlands stayed in the hands of independent Amazonian and Guaraní peoples.
In 1545 the silver of Cerro Rico, the 'rich mountain', was discovered, and the town of Potosí grew at its foot. It soon became one of the largest cities in the Americas. The silver was mined by Indigenous workers under the mita, a brutal system of forced labour.
In 1624 the University of San Francisco Xavier was founded in Sucre by order of King Philip IV of Spain. It is one of the oldest universities in the Americas, and around 1800 it became a centre of ideas of independence.
On 6 August 1825, after the victories of Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, the new republic was proclaimed. It was named after Simón Bolívar, first as the Republic of Bolívar and soon after as Bolivia.
After the Acre War, Bolivia signed the Treaty of Petrópolis in 1903 and gave Brazil the Acre territory, a region rich in rubber. Since independence Bolivia has lost more than half of its territory to its neighbours.
In April 1952 the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement took power. It introduced the vote for all adults, bringing women and Indigenous peasants into political life, carried out a land reform and nationalised the largest tin mines.
On 7 February 2009 a new constitution came into force. It renamed the country the Plurinational State of Bolivia, made 36 Indigenous languages official alongside Spanish, and made the wiphala flag a symbol of the state.
Cook one of the recipes, print the large-print pack about Bolivia, and finish with the big-screen quiz or the words crossword. Grandchildren can colour the flag.
