Teatro Municipal Luisa Molina

At nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, where water boils at a mere 189°F and cooking pasta requires a pressure cooker, Uyuni maintains a municipal theater named for Luisa Molina. Unlike Bolivia’s colonial cities with their baroque flourishes, Uyuni was born in the late 1880s as a railway junction, a working-class city on rails. Yet someone here decided that even a utilitarian town built for tin and silver transport deserved a place for performance, a facade kept pristine against the harsh Altiplano winds.

The dedication dates only to 2021, when Uyuni’s municipal government renamed the theater for Luisa Molina, a folk singer born in the town who had died of COVID-19 that year. It was less an act of grand cultural planning than a community naming its own room after one of its own, a modest bit of civic housekeeping in a place more accustomed to shipping tin than staging drama. The pale blue colonnaded front, restored to a shine that has little precedent elsewhere in town, now does most of the performing.