Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the only Bolivian city of importance which is tropical in climate as well as locality. Although it is situated at about the same distance from the equator as La Paz and Oruro, it bears little resemblance to these cities in natural scenery, because of the great difference in altitude. Too distant from the Cordillera Real to be influenced by its temperature, and lying in the midst of a valley not more than one thousand five hundred feet above sea level, Santa Cruz is essentially a tropical city, though the heat is never insupportable, as pleasant breezes are constantly blowing from the serranias of Valle Grande on the west and those of Chiquitos on the east. It is a typical Spanish city, with spacious plazas, shaded by wide-branching trees and beautified by luxuriant gardens. Its long calles are, like those of Spanish cities everywhere, walled on each side by solid-looking houses, and they present very artistic features in their picturesque miradores and quaint, barred windows, where a pretty señorita may sometimes be seen looking out, as a handsome caballero lingers near to pay homage to the charm of her “adorable eyes.” For the Cruceña, as a lady of Santa Cruz is called, is generally beautiful, graceful, and of a frank, happy disposition, altogether charming. The city is not more Spanish-looking than its people, who represent the pure Castilian type, and preserve, with few changes, the customs and characteristics of their Iberian ancestors, proud of their descent from the noblest families of Spain. Foreigners who have visited the city of Santa Cruz and its neighboring estancias, as the large cattle ranches are called, invariably remark upon the Spanish type of the people, and the very slight evidence of an admixture of races to be seen here. The population of the city is about nineteen thousand, of which two hundred are of foreign origin, belonging to German, Italian, and other nationalities.

The city of Santa Cruz was founded, as elsewhere stated, by Ñuflo de Chavez, soon after the Spanish conquest, and was later removed to its present site and given the name of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Everyone who is familiar with Bolivian history knows with what courage and success the Cruceños sustained their part in the struggle for independence, and that the famous victory of La Florida, one of the most brilliant of the war, was due to their bravery. The history of the republic bears record to the patriotism and genius of many distinguished Cruceños who have achieved national fame as statesmen, diplomats, jurists, littérateurs, and orators. Don Santiago Vaca-Guzmán, a Cruceño, has written gems of prose and verse, and represented his country abroad as minister plenipotentiary with honor and distinction. Don Manuel Ignacio Salvatierra, one of the most illustrious statesmen Bolivia ever had, was a native of Santa Cruz, and loved the pretty city of La Sierra better than any other, though he was received at all the courts of Europe and welcomed in the intellectual circles of its chief cities; he was a member of the Cabinet in his own country as minister of finance, and was fiscal general of the republic. Don Rafael Peña, also a Cruceño, has filled many offices of distinction, and has rendered invaluable services to the government as prefect of Santa Cruz, minister of the Supreme Court of the nation, and fiscal general, and he has written books of great merit, especially La Flora Cruceña, which is regarded as one of the most important contributions to Bolivian literature. Don Juan Francisco Velarde, Bolivian minister to Washington a few years ago, and several times member of the Cabinet, is a noted journalist and writer. Don Gabriel Réné Moreno, one of the most brilliant writers of South America, and Don Ignacio Terán, the learned director of the University of San Francisco Xavier, are proud to claim Santa Cruz as their native city. These are only a few names selected to show how active the Cruceño is in contributing his share to the national progress.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra is situated in the central part of the department of Santa Cruz, and in a well-watered region, marking the divide which from this point eastward separates the tributaries of the Madeira from those of the Paraguay. Although distant about three hundred and fifty miles from Cochabamba, the nearest large city, Santa Cruz is reached on horseback without difficulty, though sometimes, in the wet season, with delays occasioned by bad roads. The citizens are naturally desirous of seeing the early completion of the new railroad system, which will put them in closer connection not only with other cities, but also with the chief shipping port of the department, Puerto Suarez. But though so remote from the popular highways of travel, the city has many modern conveniences, fine public buildings, and commodious residences. As the seat of a bishopric, it has a cathedral of imposing structure; and the government palace, national college, agricultural school, public library, and hospital occupy well-constructed edifices. Manufacturing establishments are numerous, including saw mills, silk and cotton factories, tanneries, and various small enterprises devoted to the manufacture of dulces, or preserved fruits, chocolate, and other confections. Panamá hats, which are woven of jipijapa fibre, are also made in this city. All the commerce between Santa Cruz and foreign countries passes through the ports of Villa Bella, Puerto Suarez, and Antofagasta. The city is connected with the other department capitals by telegraph, and several long-distance telephone lines connect it with neighboring towns and with the provincial capitals of the department. Roads lead out of the capital to all the principal cities of the department. In the vicinity of the city are celebrated mineral springs and thermal baths of the highest medicinal value.

The department of Santa Cruz comprises one of the most productive regions of South America. It is so favored by climate and an abundance of natural resources that travellers unite in pronouncing it a wonderful land of promise, awaiting only the necessary industrial enterprise and commercial facilities to convert it into the most flourishing and prosperous of agricultural countries. Nature seems to have bestowed unlimited wealth on this territory, in which gold and precious stones are known to abound, forests of rubber trees yield great wealth, all kinds of fruits and cereals grow with little cultivation, and cattle raising is always a profitable enterprise. The department covers about twenty thousand square leagues. Its western boundary is marked by the headwaters of the Mamoré, which divide it from the department of Cochabamba; on the east it extends to the Paraguay River and to the Rio Verde branch of the Guaporé, by both of which it is separated from Brazil; the department of the Beni extends across its northern boundary, and to the south it adjoins the department of Chuquisaca. The western section is close to the foothills of the Cordillera Real, the provinces of Valle Grande, Cercado, and Sara, which border the department of Cochabamba, being traversed by serranias that are rich in minerals and afford unlimited pasturage for cattle on their fertile slopes. In the south are grown peaches, oranges, lemons, figs, bananas, and pineapples, while in the central and northern districts the more tropical dates, chirimoyas, and granadillas are cultivated. Medicinal trees and plants of great value are found here, the best known being the cinchona, from which quinine is extracted, the coca, the sarsaparilla,—smilax medica,—and the jalap. Almost every agricultural product known is cultivated in some section of the department. Wheat, corn, and alfalfa grow in abundance in the hills of the western districts, and in the rolling plains and more level tracts of the central provinces of Velasco and Chiquitos are large plantations of sugar cane, cotton, cacao, cocoa, mandioca, vanilla, tobacco, rice, and coffee. The low lands which border the upper streams of the Paraguay and the Guaporé are rich in rubber trees, an important source of revenue to the department. The growth of all products is luxuriant, corn being harvested three months after planting, sugar cane within eight months, and rice every five or six months. Chiquitos produces rice without cultivation. An example of the enormous undeveloped wealth of eastern Bolivia is shown in the rice crop alone, which is hardly sufficient to supply the market of a single province of the department. Though rice can be planted at any season of the year, is cultivated with the greatest facility, grows so abundantly that for every bushel sown the harvest is forty bushels, and is of the very best quality, yet millions of pounds of rice are imported every year. A planter has been known to sow a fanega, about one and a half bushels, at the beginning of the year, harvest forty fanegas in five months, plant the forty fanegas immediately and gather at the end of the year a harvest of one thousand six hundred fanegas, the year’s labor having recompensed him by an increase of one thousand five hundred and fifty-nine fanegas. There are two kinds of Bolivian rice, the white and the pink variety. The soil and climate of Santa Cruz are peculiarly suited to its cultivation, and it will no doubt be one of the principal products of the department in the near future, as the attention of progressive agriculturists has already been attracted to the great possibilities of this industry.

Another product which grows in prolific abundance and of superior quality in Santa Cruz is the sugar cane. This department should be one of the greatest sugar-producing regions in the world, so favorable are the conditions for its cultivation. At present only the most primitive methods are used in the development of this industry, while the expense of transportation is too great to make it as profitable as it should be. When modern machinery is imported to take the place of the antiquated apparatus which has been generally used, the sugar industry will become one of Bolivia’s greatest sources of wealth. The influence of the progressive conditions that have been governing the country during the past few years is having a beneficial effect on agricultural as well as other enterprises. The report for 1905 shows a notable increase over the five preceding years in the quantity of sugar exported, which amounts to more than a million pounds annually. Little or none of the Santa Cruz sugar leaves Bolivia, most of it being consumed in this and other departments, excepting in Chuquisaca and Potosí, which grow their own sugar. The manufacture of alcohol and rum increases every year, the quantity produced by Santa Cruz alone being estimated at three hundred thousand gallons annually. The process of setting out a sugar plantation is described by those who have seen it as the simplest imaginable. First a space is cleared in the bosque by cutting down the trees and underbrush; and a few days afterward, when the wood is quite dry, it is set on fire and burned, to leave the land perfectly clean for cultivation. Then the planter, with a wooden stick, digs holes in the ground, about three feet apart, and in each of these he plants a piece of cane, pushing it down into the soil with his hand. This is done in November, and in May the harvesting begins. Such a plantation will continue to yield for four years, each successive harvest producing a sweeter quality of sugar. The cane grows to a height of from fifteen to twenty feet the first year.

Cotton grows with so little cultivation that it receives hardly any attention, though it will no doubt provide an important industry when improved transportation facilities lead to the general development of agriculture on a larger scale.

Although the cinchona tree grows in great abundance in the department, this industry is, like nearly every other of eastern Bolivia, still in the infancy of development. There are vast forests of these trees which have not even been thoroughly explored, and the few quinales, as the quinine-producing plantations are called, which are exploited by large companies, chiefly belong to foreign syndicates. These quinales are usually situated on the slopes of the mountains, at an altitude of from three thousand to seven thousand feet above sea level, and have been raised from seed gathered in the springtime and sprouted in hothouses. The trees grow within five years to a height of eighteen feet, straight and slender in form, the trunk measuring about twenty inches in circumference. After five years’ growth it is sufficiently developed to yield bark for the market, a few strips about two inches wide and five feet long being cut from the trunk and laid out to dry before shipment. This is done twice or three times a year, the bark growing anew within a couple of years, when the tree may be stripped again, in other places. Older trees yield bark from their largest branches, as well as from the trunk, and a mature tree will produce on an average about five pounds of bark.

Petroleum is found in abundance in the department of Santa Cruz, within ten leagues of its capital city, and yet this valuable product remains unexploited, while four bolivianos per gallon are paid for the imported article. In the provinces of Valle Grande and Sara iron and mercury exist in large quantities, gold abounds in the mountains and streams of Chiquitos province, and salt is a product of several lakes of the department. Besides the celebrated mine of Santa Rosa, which is situated in the province of Velasco about two hundred miles north of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, on the border of the San Miguel River, and which, as stated elsewhere, has long been a famous gold-mining centre, there are other rich and promising placer mines in this province and in Chiquitos. Sorotocó, Quebrada Ancha, Clemente, Limas, Pehichi, Brígida, and Naranjos are names well known to Bolivian miners as belonging to districts that have yielded many thousands of pounds of gold within the past half-century. Every explorer who visits Chiquitos returns with wonderful stories of its mineral wealth and the precious stones to be found there. San José, which lies on theroute of the new railway to be built from Santa Cruz to Puerto Suarez, has been worked only in the most primitive fashion, yet has produced large quantities of gold, and the whole province of Chiquitos gives promise of proving a rich storehouse full of the precious metal when once its mountains and streams are thoroughly explored. Most of the rivers in the department contain gold, and the river system is very extensive, including affluents both of the Amazon and the La Plata waterways.

The western part of Santa Cruz department is watered chiefly by the Rio Grande or Guapay, which after traversing the provinces of Valle Grande and Sara, turns northward to join the Mamoré. This large river is navigable throughout nearly its whole length, and its tributaries, the Piray and the Yapacaní, which flow through the province of Sara, are also navigable for callapos and balsas. The province of Velasco is watered by the river San Miguel, which rises in Lake Concepcion on the border of Chiquitos province and crosses the department in a northwesterly direction, joining the Guaporé, after traversing the eastern section of the department of the Beni. It is an important river and receives many tributaries throughout its course, chief among them the Rio Negro. Dense forests of rubber are found along the route of these rivers, as well as in the neighborhood of the Rio Blanco, the Serre or Paragua, and the Rio Verde, all of which rise in Velasco province and, after crossing the Beni, join the Guaporé. The Rio Verde is especially rich in rubber trees, and has the additional importance of marking the source of navigation on this branch of the Madeira system of waterways. The recently established port of Iténez at the junction of the Rio Verde with the Guaporé, on the northeastern boundary of Santa Cruz department, is an important acquisition to the transportation facilities of this region.

Of the river system which fertilizes the southern provinces of Chiquitos and La Cordillera, the principal affluent is the Otuquis, or Rio Negro, a tributary of the Paraguay, formed by the confluence of the Tucabaca and the San Rafael Rivers. The Tucabaca is a small stream which receives its waters from the periodical torrents that sweep down from the serranias of Santiago and Sunsa, and it flows through an almost uninterrupted stretch of virgin forest, and between level banks free from undergrowth, though the river is impeded at intervals by the débris which usually collects in the channels of forest streams. The San Rafael is formed by the uniting of many small affluents from the serranias of Santiago, and in its course to the Otuquis it receives the thermal waters of Florida and Topera, entering the main river under the name of Agua Caliente, “hot water,” at a point called Santo Corazón. The Otuquis is navigable for thirty-six miles from its mouth, and may be made a serviceable waterway for a distance of two hundred and fifty miles when the work of clearing its channel from tree trunks and other obstacles is completed. The Pirapiti, which rises in the serrania of Pomabamba, department of Chuquisaca, is variously given as a tributary of the Otuquis, which it is said to join near the headwaters of the latter, as an independent river emptying into Lake Concepcion, and as a tributary of the San Miguel, which is generally described as having its source in Lake Concepcion, in the province of Chiquitos. This lake is one of the most important in the department, having a circumference of about twenty leagues, though there are several lagoons, called curiches and bañados, along the courses of the various rivers which water the department. The Salinas de Santiago and Salinas de San José, in the province of La Cordillera, are similar in appearance to those of Poopo and Coipasa on the Titicaca plateau, and are noted for their saline properties.

The river system of the eastern part of Bolivia is somewhat complicated, there being some sections of the great divortia aquarum, or water divide, between the Amazon and La Plata system, which are so slightly marked that a heavy flood is sufficient to alter the direction of the currents. The Rio Aguaclara, which flows into the Alegre and is known a few miles below as the Guaporé, rises in the same cerro as the Pezca which is a branch of the Jaurú, as the Paraguay River is called for the first few miles of its course. The Guaporé and the Paraguay are only five miles apart, and it has been suggested that the two waterways could be profitably joined for the purposes of commerce. At Bahia Negra, which is the name given to that region of the Upper Paraguay which marks the junction of the Paraguay with the Otuquis, the main river is bordered by very low banks hardly more than five or six feet above the water at high tide and subject to inundation during the rainy season. Puerto Pacheco, which is situated south of Bahia Negra, in the region popularly known as the Chaco Boreal, and at a distance of one thousand five hundred miles from Buenos Aires, is the chief river port of this part of Bolivia. To the north of Puerto Pacheco, the Paraguay River has sufficient depth for the navigation of small steamers as far as Lakes Gaiba and Uberaba, where the Jaurú enters a broader channel and becomes known as the Paraguay. The Gaiba is deep enough to admit boats drawing from six to eight feet of water. This is one of the richest zones of eastern Bolivia; and once it is opened to industrial development, pasture lands of the first order will be established here, an increasing demand will be made for the forest lands on which valuable timber grows in abundance, and the advantages of this region for the purposes of agriculture, such as coffee growing and rice culture, will be recognized. When one considers how desperate is the competition in industry and commerce in the overcrowded countries of Europe, and what a constant struggle the masses have to endure in order to get their daily bread, it is not surprising that enthusiasm should be awakened at the spectacle of the abundance which is to be had by little effort in these vast forests and fertile plains, and the prediction is naturally forced upon one that the day is not far distant when the steamers that ply up and down the Paraguay will bring multitudes of immigrants to its shores, and that the thousands of square leagues which now lie idle will provide for the comfort and well-being of many happy colonists.

As in all tropical countries, the climate of the department of Santa Cruz is marked by only two seasons, the winter being known as the dry and the summer as the wet season. Winter usually begins in April and lasts until September or October, and is characterized by alternating north and south winds, the north wind being very pleasant, but the south wind bringing such an abrupt lowering of the temperature that the inhabitants are obliged to wear heavy clothing during the two or three days that it lasts. The warm season becomes more marked each month from September until February or March; and the rains, which begin in December or January, continue until April, diminishing gradually. In the southern part the seasons are modified, and in Chiquitos, where the serranias mark an altitude of four or five thousand feet above sea level, the four seasons are very clearly defined.

Hunting is one of the pastimes afforded by the abundance of wild animals in the forests of Santa Cruz, the game being of the species usually found in tropical countries. Handsome tiger skins are frequently brought into the city for sale, as well as huge cobra skins, the largest to be found anywhere, some of them measuring thirty feet in length. Foxes, rabbits, tapirs, wildcats, and monkeys abound. The sloth is a native of these bosques, and is seen everywhere in the great tropical forests of Velasco. It is very interesting to watch this animal, the symbol of laziness, slowly making its two or three feet of progress a day. It has protection from attack in long talons, which it fixes so securely in the flesh of the enemy that they can be removed only by being cut out. So deliberate are its movements that a hare can run miles while it is turning its head. The sloth is about the size of a cat, though it bears no resemblance whatever to the feline species. Its coat is of coarse gray hair. Fishermen find good sport in the streams, though there are not many varieties of fish, but turtles are found of every kind. The forests abound in every variety of the feathered species from the magnificent macaw with its glorious plumage flashing in the sunlight, where golden rays pierce the deep shadows of tropical woodland, to the tiny humming bird that sparkles like a brilliant gem as it sips the sweetest blossoms of groves that are laden with perfumed flowers. Hunters seldom disturb these beautiful birds, and they enjoy unlimited freedom.

The charm of the tropics is acknowledged by all who have lived under its spell for a time. There is a beauty in the great, towering monarchs of the forest, in the luxuriant verdure, in the rich greens of the valleys, and in the gorgeous hues of a thousand blossoms. The birds are so happy in perpetual summer land, and even those which do not sing are enchanting in their gay plumage and graceful flight. Murmuring streams and flashing cascades have a beauty that is irresistible, and there is no voice so alluring as the whisper of the tropical breeze borne upon the still air of Nature’s ideal dreamland.