The market at the top of the hill, and the Wikipedia editors who went there

It’s 9 in the morning, and Eloisa Larrea and I (Carla Salazar) are meeting at a halfway point in La Paz to head to the Alto Santiago de Lacaya market. Neither of us has been there before. We’re going to talk with Mrs. Lucila Cutipa, who co-founded the market and sells fried fish there. She’s also a theater actress. We got in touch with her through Erika Andia, who directs Kory Warmis, a theater group made up of actresses who work as vendors and artisans around the city.

In August 2026, Wikimedistas de Bolivia and WikiAcción Perú launched a contest called Fiesta Plurinacional: Nuestros Mercados. The idea is to add more content about markets and popular economy in both countries. So meeting Lucila seemed like a good opportunity to learn more about how markets in La Paz work and how they organize themselves. Plus, visiting her at her stall meant we could take photos of the place and talk to other vendors while we were there.

The Alto Santiago de Lacaya market sits in the Periférica macro-district of La Paz. It’s small and only open on Tuesday and Friday mornings. And it sits, literally, at the top of the hill (and no, that’s not just a saying, nor is it an exaggeration). From there you can see the Illimani and the whole city spread out below. Across the street is a public transport stop, and nearby there’s a school. A little further up the hill, there are just two or three small houses and then nothing else.

After we say hello and chat for a bit, Lucila introduces us to the market leaders, Sonia Juchani and Ilda Jove. We tell them about the campaign and about Wikipedia. None of them had ever heard of it, so we explain how it works and the kind of photos people upload to Wikimedia Commons. Then we take some portraits of them and start photographing the market.

Eloisa is the better photographer, and she’s also more outgoing, so she has no trouble asking the vendors for permission to take pictures of their stalls. I take the chance to talk a bit more with Lucila about how the market came to be. She tells me it opened a little over ten years ago, thanks to the women in the neighborhood. They really needed a place to buy groceries closer to home (before that, they had to travel long distances just to get the basics). On July 25th, 2016, 25 women from Alto Santiago de Lacaya got together and decided the community needed a market. It wasn’t really about business. It was about solving a problem that affected everyone: the nearest market was more than three kilometers away, in Villa Fátima.

Talking to Lucila, I find myself thinking about how much self-organization matters in any community. In a way, it reminds me of the Wikimedia movement itself: there are large communities and small communities, and often the smaller ones have to find ways to share their knowledge despite all the limitations they face. 

Lucila asks if we’re going to write a Wikipedia article for the Alto Santiago de Lacaya market. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough sources. Actually, there aren’t enough sources for most Bolivian markets, even the big ones. Most articles only mention them in passing, or when something goes wrong (an accident, a fire). The media rarely take the time to acknowledge the community work that vendors do, or to reflect on how important markets are to daily life here. “But don’t lose hope,” Lucila says, “someday this market will be big, and everyone will talk about it”.

Her optimism stays with me. Sometimes writing about our countries on Wikipedia is really hard. You know something matters because you live there, but you can’t always find sources to prove it. As someone who lives there, you know that this or that topic is very relevant, but you don’t have sources to back you up. And so you end up digging for information here and there, searching for even the smallest detail to be able to put on Wikipedia something that clearly has enormous encyclopedic relevance. That’s why this Bolivia-Peru campaign feels so valuable: it puts a spotlight on something that often stays invisible. Our countries live on the streets, in the markets. And markets are like the heart of our communities, mostly held together by women.

Lucila is wonderfully generous. After Eloisa finishes taking photos (see all of her pictures here), Lucila invites us to share a plate of fried pejerrey. She also tells us, with visible pride, that the potatoes and chuño on the plate come from her own garden.

The fish is really good, and Eloisa and I finish it quickly. When we ask what we owe her, she says nothing. It’s a gift, and that fills our hearts.

Before we leave, we invite her to join the second panel of Fiesta Plurinacional: Nuestros Mercados, so she can share with anyone interested what it’s like to start a market from scratch and what it means to be a caserita (vendor) there. Her talk is available here (in Spanish).

I hope that soon the Alto Santiago de Lacaya market gets its own Wikipedia article, along with the hundreds of other markets that keep life going in Bolivia and Peru, and that still haven’t found their rightful place in the world’s largest encyclopedia.