Three days in Cochabamba: the city Bolivians go to for lunch

Start on Plaza 14 de Septiembre, which is named for the 1810 uprising and is the pleasantest square in the city: palm trees, arcades on all four sides, shoeshine men, and the cathedral of San Sebastián on the eastern flank.

Three blocks away is the Museo Arqueológico, run by the university and much better than its size suggests. The valley was occupied for thousands of years before the Spanish and by several cultures in turn, and the collection runs from Tiwanaku pottery through mummies preserved in the dry altiplano air to a case of skulls deliberately bound and reshaped in infancy, which was a mark of status and is deeply strange to look at.

In the afternoon, the Convento de Santa Teresa. The Carmelites built it in 1760 and enclosed nuns lived in it for two centuries, and the restoration has kept it as a working house rather than turning it into a gallery: the kitchen, the choir with its grille, the turntable through which the outside world passed messages and food, the paintings the nuns collected. You go round with a guide at set hours, so check the timetable when you pass in the morning.

Give the morning to La Cancha, which is not so much a market as a district: several covered halls and many streets of stalls running south from the centre towards the bus terminal, and by most accounts the largest open-air market in South America. It is not arranged for visitors. There are aisles of nothing but sacks of grain, aisles of car parts, a section for spells and offerings, a hall of butchers, a street of hats, and a food court where a plate costs a couple of dollars. Saturday is the biggest day and Wednesday close behind. Watch your pockets and enjoy it.

Eat there, then get across town to the Cristo. The statue stands on the Cerro San Pedro above the eastern side of the city, thirty-four metres of it on top of a plinth, and it was the tallest statue of Christ anywhere until Poland built a taller one in 2010. It is a few metres higher than the one over Rio, which is a fact every single person here will tell you.

The cable car up runs most days and takes a few minutes; the alternative is a long flight of steps that is not recommended alone. On Sundays you can usually climb the internal staircase into the arms and look out through the openings at shoulder height. The view over the valley to the Tunari ridge is the reason to go up whether or not the staircase is open.

Simón Patiño was born poor in this valley, bought a stake in a tin mine on a hunch, and ended up controlling a large share of the world's tin supply and living in Europe. Between 1915 and 1927 he had Palacio Portales built here, in the north of the city, by a French architect using marble from Carrara, wood from Africa and tiles copied from the Alhambra, and then never lived in it.

It is now a cultural centre, opened only for tours at set hours, so check the times the day before. The interior lurches from a Louis XV salon to a Moorish games room to a Renaissance dining hall, which sounds ridiculous and is oddly moving: a man who had everything and no idea what to want. The gardens outside were laid out by a Japanese designer and are free to walk in.

The airport is fifteen minutes from there and the bus terminal a little further south, which makes this an easy last morning either way.