Maragua Crater: A Day Trek From Sucre Into an Eroded Dome

What the Maragua crater actually is

Nothing hit it. The name is a description of the shape rather than of the cause, and the shape was made by water and time working on rock that was already bent.

What happened is that the strata here were folded into a dome by the mountain building that raised the Andes, and then the middle of that dome eroded away. The softer rock in the centre went first; the harder layers around it did not. What is left is a bowl several kilometres across with rings of upturned rock standing around a flat floor, and from the rim the whole structure reads at once.

It is a better story than a meteorite, and it is the reason the dinosaur footprints on the way in are standing on end rather than lying flat.

The walking: a pre-Columbian road

The trekking part of this tour is a two-hour descent on a surviving section of the pre-Columbian road network, from a chapel on the ridge at Chataquila down to the village of Chaunaca.

It is worth saying clearly that this is not the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. That is a four-day trek in Peru with a permit system and a queue. This is a morning on a stone-paved road in Bolivia that almost nobody has heard of, and much of the paving is still there under your boots.

The walking is downhill and it is not technical. It is also two hours on uneven stone at altitude, which is a different proposition from two hours on a path at sea level, and the guide sets a pace accordingly.

The dinosaur footprints

The afternoon is spent at tracks left in what was, in the Cretaceous, a flat and wet lake margin. Animals walked across it, the prints were buried and hardened, and then the whole surface was tilted towards vertical by the same forces that folded the dome.

So you look at them on a wall rather than on the ground. That single fact is what makes the site remarkable and it is also the clearest possible demonstration of what the geology has done here: the footprints prove the rock was once horizontal.

Sucre has a more famous dinosaur site at Cal Orcko on the edge of the city, which this tour does not visit. The Maragua tracks are quieter, less managed and set in a landscape that explains them.

The people who live here

The crater floor is farmed. The Jalqa live here, and if a weaver is available the tour includes time with her and an explanation of the textiles, which are among the most distinctive in the Andes.

Jalqa weaving is dense, red and black, and populated by khurus: imagined animals, asymmetric, arranged without a horizon, depicting a chaotic underworld rather than the ordered upper one that most Andean textile traditions show. It is not decorative in the way visitors expect and it takes a while to learn to read.

Whether you meet a weaver depends on the day, and the operator says so rather than promising it. That is the correct way to describe an encounter with a person who has her own life.

The altitude, which is the real variable

Sucre sits at about 2,810 metres and the trek begins higher than the city. That is not extreme by Bolivian standards, and it is quite high enough to matter if you have flown in recently.

The walking is downhill, which helps a great deal. What does not help is arriving from sea level the day before and going straight out for ten hours. Give yourself two days in Sucre first if you can, drink considerably more water than feels necessary, and treat the first evening as a rest rather than a night out.

The sun at this altitude is fierce even when the air is cool, which is the mistake almost every first-time visitor to the Andes makes exactly once. A hat and sunscreen are not optional.

What the ten hours contain

A hotel pickup at half past eight. An hour by road to the Chataquila chapel. Two hours walking down to Chaunaca. The vehicle again to the crater, where lunch is served, and a visit to La Garganta del Diablo, the gorge cut through the upturned rock.

Then the afternoon at the dinosaur footprints, about two hours, and the drive back to Sucre.

Private transport, entry tickets, a guide in English or Spanish, a first aid kit and a vegetarian lunch are included. What you bring is water, sun protection, and shoes you can walk two hours downhill in.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It suits anyone with an interest in landscape who would rather understand a place than photograph it, and anyone who has spent a few days in Sucre and wants to see what is outside it.

It suits it less well if you have just arrived at altitude, if two hours on uneven ground is a problem, or if you want a short morning out. Ten hours is a full day.

And it suits people who like the idea of a famous thing that is not famous. The Peruvian Inca trail has a permit lottery; this road has a chapel, a gate and nobody on it.