Discover Bolivia’s ‘Suicide Homes’. Would you live here?

Hundreds of buildings with colorful corrugated metal roofs – blues, oranges, reds and greens, located on the edge of a steep earthen cliff on the outskirts of El Alto, the second-largest city in Bolivia, located adjacent to La Paz in Pedro Domingo Murillo Province on the Altiplano highlands, have been dubbed “suicide homes” because of the high risk of…a devastating landslide!

Well, and that’s not a joke!
Located on Avenida Panorámica and in La Ceja, one of the busiest commercial areas of the city, suicide homes lie in a very precarious positioning, on the very edge of an earth cliff that has been deemed very susceptible to landslides.
However, also when rains wreak havoc in Bolivia’s capital and its surrounding area, increasing the risk of a landslide even more, it doesn’t seem to scare the inhabitants of these precarious homes one bit, as most of them refuse to move away.
These buildings are inhabited by local shamans known as yatiri and merchants who don’t want to give up their place of business even if it means falling to their deaths one day.

And they are not going to move from this place, because this is their daily work place, they said, also stating they are going to take care of the soil, especially the rainwater, and they are going to channel it so that the water goes somewhere else.
Actua
Actually, preventing the water from eroding the earthen cliff even more is easier said than done, and local authorities say that further collapse of the cliff is imminent, so the buildings must be evacuated for the good of their inhabitants.

“The precipice in this valley is 90 degrees,” said Gabriel Pari, municipal secretary of water, sanitation, environmental management and risk.
“That is precisely why we want them to leave this place, if they do not want to leave we are going to have to use force,” added.
The shamans, however, make opposition, despite the back doors of the rickety homes having only a narrow ledge before the ground drops away completely.

Either way, built out of brick and covered with sheets of corrugated iron, the rickety suicide homes are very important to the yatiris and they would do anything to keep them.
Some have even suggested making offerings to the Pachamama, the goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes, or Earth Mother.

“We can do an offering ceremony, we do it as a payment and in this way, the land will never move because Pachamama needs an offering,” one shaman said. “It is like giving food and this way this place will not move. On the contrary, it will stabilize.”

El Alto, and the highland political capital of La Paz nestled in the valley below it, often bend the mind with the their amazing landscape that reflects the surrounding Andean mountains, and this led local authorities to build cable cars to help people get around.
However that landscape is getting more treacherous as weather patterns become more extreme and, even if the suicide homes have been on the edge for a while, heavy rains and environmental changes attributed to climate change have increased the risk of a landslide.

Images from web – Google Research