Festival de la Saya Afroboliviana

Festival de la Saya Afroboliviana brings together community groups from across the Yungas valleys to perform saya, the call-and-response music and dance tradition built on tambor mayor drums and ankle-worn guanchas that traces back to enslaved Africans brought to work the region's coca and coffee haciendas. Held in towns like Chicaloma, Coripata and Mururata, it is one of the clearest ways to encounter Bolivia's small, historically overlooked Afro-Bolivian community and its living ceremonial monarchy.

Bolivia's Afro-descendant community is small and concentrated almost entirely in the Yungas, the subtropical valleys northeast of La Paz where enslaved Africans were brought from the sixteenth century onward to work first in the Potosi mines and later on coca and coffee haciendas in towns like Chicaloma, Coripata and Mururata.