Calle Jaen Museums, Casa de Murillo and MUSEF in the Casco Viejo

Four blocks north of Plaza Murillo in the oldest quarter of the Casco Viejo, modern traffic gives way to a quiet, 100-metre-long pedestrian lane paved in geometric black-and-white river cobbles: Calle Apolinar Jaen. Preserving the exact street width and cantilevered wooden balconies of sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish colonial La Paz, the alley houses a concentrated cluster of four municipal museums (accessible on a single combined ticket), while two blocks south stands Bolivia's premier ethnography museum, MUSEF. Pair these stops with Day 1 of our 3-day La Paz itinerary.

The Four Museums of Sixteenth-Century Calle Jaen

1. Casa de Murillo: This restored two-storey courtyard mansion was the residence of patriot Pedro Domingo Murillo, where conspirators of the Junta Tuitiva drafted the revolutionary proclamation of 16 July 1809. Its upper rooms display colonial oil paintings of the Potosi and Lake Titicaca schools, carved furniture, hammered silverwork, and independence manuscripts.
2. Museo de Metales Preciosos Precolombinos (Pre-Columbian Gold Museum): Housed in the former mansion of Apolinar Jaen himself, an underground security vault exhibits gleaming gold diadems, hammered pectorals, ceremonial tumi knives, silver figurines, and turquoise-inlaid ornaments crafted by the Tiwanaku, Wankarani, Mollo, and Inca civilisations.
3. Museo del Litoral Boliviano: Four rooms of maps, nineteenth-century photographs, and naval artefacts document Bolivia's former Pacific Ocean province of Antofagasta and Cobija, lost to Chile during the 1879 to 1884 War of the Pacific.
4. Museo Costumbrista Juan de Vargas and the Musical Instrument Museum: At the northern end of the street on Plaza Riosinho, the Museo Costumbrista uses intricate ceramic miniature dioramas to recreate nineteenth-century La Paz street life, while at Jaen 711 the Museo de Instrumentos Musicales de Bolivia (founded by master charango player Ernesto Cavour) displays more than 2,000 indigenous wind, percussion, and string instruments, including charangos, giant toyo panpipes, and curved erke horns.

Museo Nacional de Etnografia y Folklore (MUSEF)

Walking two blocks south to Calle Ingavi 916 brings you to the Museo Nacional de Etnografia y Folklore (MUSEF), housed inside the 1730 Palace of the Marquises of Villaverde. Step through the portal into one of the finest colonial stone courtyards in the Andes, where a semicircular stone arch above the grand staircase is carved with twin heraldic lions and reliefs representing the four continents. Inside the modern exhibition wings, superbly curated galleries trace 3,000 years of Bolivian textile engineering (aguayos and ceremonial tunics), Amazonian and highland feather art (arte plumario), ceramic vessels, and a dazzling hall of hundreds of carved wooden, tinplate, and embroidered festival masks worn in the Diablada, Morenada, and Waka Waka dances.