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Introducing Santa Cruz
Bolivia’s largest city may surprise you with its small-town feeling, lack of high-rise blocks and a lightly buzzing, relaxed tropical atmosphere. Many arrive here expecting to find a city of businesspeople and throbbing traffic, but in truth, though Santa Cruz is the country’s business center and most affluent city, it has kept its tameness. The locals still lounge on the main square, restaurants close for siesta and little stores line the porch-fronted houses and sell cheap local products.
Santa Cruz is certainly not where you’ll find the Bolivia you see in pictures, and you won’t brush shoulders with a llama (apart from in a zoo or on your plate), but this is the place with the largest population diversity in the country – from the overall-wearing Mennonites strolling the streets past local Goth kids, to a Japanese community, Altiplano immigrants, Cuban doctors, descendants of ex-Nazi runaways, Brazilian immigrants, bearded Russians, and fashionable cruceños (Santa Cruz locals) turning sharp corners in their SUVs.
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