Three days in Sucre: Bolivia's other capital, and the one you would rather stay in

Start on Plaza 25 de Mayo, which is named for the uprising of 25 May 1809, one of the first anywhere in Spanish America and sixteen years before it came to anything. The cathedral takes one side, the prefecture another, and the arcades under the buildings are full of ice cream and shoe polish.

The Casa de la Libertad is on the square, in what was a Jesuit university chapel. This is the room where the declaration of independence was signed in August 1825 and where the republic took its name from Simón Bolívar, and the museum around it holds the first Bolivian flag, portraits of the founders and a good deal of argument about them. The guided tour, included, is the only way to see it and is worth taking in English if one is running.

In the late afternoon walk up Calle Dalence to La Recoleta on the hill at the eastern end of town. The Franciscan monastery there has a cloister with a cedar in it said to be over a thousand years old, a church with carved choir stalls, and a long stone bench under white arches on the plaza outside, which is where the whole city goes to watch the sun go down over the roofs.

Cal Orck'o is a cement quarry five kilometres north of town, and in 1994 the quarrying exposed a wall of limestone standing at seventy degrees with thousands of dinosaur footprints on it. The rock was a lake shore in the late Cretaceous and was later tipped on its edge by the Andes rising, so tracks that were laid down flat now run vertically up a cliff. More than five thousand prints have been counted from several species, including a single sauropod trail hundreds of metres long.

The visitor park above it has viewing platforms, casts and a walking tour down to the base at set times. Go on the morning tour, both for the light and because the quarry is still working.

Back in town, the ASUR museum on the way up to La Recoleta is small and unexpectedly good. It shows the weaving of two nearby peoples, the Jalq'a and the Tarabuco, and the difference between them is startling once you have been shown it: Tarabuco cloth is ordered and striped, Jalq'a cloth is a black and red world of distorted animals with no ground and no sky. Weavers usually work in the courtyard and their pieces are sold at fair prices in the shop.

Finish in the Mercado Central, two blocks off the square, for the juice stalls upstairs. Point at whatever fruit you do not recognise and they will blend it with milk in front of you.

The cathedral on the main square was begun in 1551 and took nearly a hundred years, which is why the front is plain and the inside is not. The chapel beside it holds the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that the city was given in 1601, and which generations of donors have since covered in gold, pearls and emeralds. The museum rooms next door hold colonial painting from the Potosí school.

Then take a taxi south down the valley to the Castillo de la Glorieta, which is either the strangest building in Bolivia or the most endearing. Francisco Argandoña and his wife Clotilde made a silver fortune, spent it on orphanages, and in 1898 were made prince and princess of La Glorieta by Pope Leo XIII. They then built themselves a palace to match, with a Moorish tower, a Byzantine dome, a Gothic wing and a Venetian canal, all at once. It was seized after they died, used as a barracks, and is now a partly restored museum in the grounds of a military school.

It sits on the road south, in the direction of the airport, which makes it an easy last stop on the way out.