Residencial Sorata
It's difficult to say when a hotel goes from being just a place to sleep to a destination in itself, but using 10-metre python skins as wall hangings is a pretty good place to start.
'The plantation workers killed them while clearing land in the 1890s,' says Louis Demurs, caretaker of Bolivia's Residencial Sorata, a creaky old colonial-era hotel in the medieval mountain town of Sorata, 100km north of La Paz.
Short and bearded, with a gnome-like mien and impenetrable accent, the French-Canadian Demurs is a trove of information about his beloved hotel, the history of which reads like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez epic. Originally built in the 1830s, the building was expanded during a 60-year period by a series of German agriculturalists, starting with the Richters, who became rich from planting cinchona, the bark of which was used to make quinine. Cinchona made the Richters one of Bolivia's most influential families.
A fortune was spent on the family home's white facade and high-ceilinged foyer, with most of the work done by Richter's architect, a mason whose idiosyncratic touches - sirens with serpents in their hair, for example - instilled in the locals a firm belief that the owners were satanists.
Because Sorata was ideally positioned for La Paz, the cinchona plantations and the nearby goldfields of Mapiri, the town began making mountains of money. Then came the rubber boom of the late 1880s and with it a Hapsburg businessman named Ernesto Gunther, who bought the Richter mansion and replaced the cinchona fields with rubber trees. Gunther used his profits to start an export-import business, bringing in everything from French champagne to chandeliers. 'As the house became more and more luxurious, it became a virtual de facto office of state,' says Demurs. 'Everyone stayed here, kings and politicians.'
But Gunther was also greedy. From 1895 to 1904 he was in partnership with Elvin Berg, a Norwegian who managed the plantations. When Berg was accused of killing workers from a neighbouring farm during a border dispute, he fled to Cusco, Peru, and the German took the opportunity to shut his partner out of the business. Berg remained in Cusco, becoming a rubber and beer magnate, but Gunther floundered.
In 1920, the mansion was attacked during a republican coup (you can see the bullet holes in the front doors) and Gunther escaped to La Paz, where his relatives still live.
In post-war years the mansion belonged, in effect, to Gunther's administrator, Willy Fernan, whose right-wing tendencies became apparent when giant swastikas were draped from the windows. (The reading room still features stacks of yellowing Weimar Republic newspapers and portraits of Hindenburg and the kaisers.)
After another revolution in 1952, pressure mounted on Bolivia's large landholders. Fernan's son-in-law, Alberto Fernholz, who had taken over in the late 1940s, held out until 1968, when Sorata's mayor threatened to reappropriate the mansion. To prevent this, Fernholz declared the mansion a hotel.
The place is now frequented by travellers enjoying Bolivia's best breakfasts in the second-floor restaurant. For first-class Italian cuisine head to Ristorante Italiano, run by Guiseppe Antonini, a chef from Bologna and 12-year Sorata veteran.
Built in a valley, surrounded by snow-capped peaks and verdant, terraced hills, Sorata makes for a perfect excursion from La Paz. Because it's half way between the Andes and the lowland, the air has a minty freshness, but not the bone-biting chill of the capital. The bus trip can be bumpy, but sharing the reading room with Kaiser Wilhelm II makes it worthwhile.
