Which capital city sits at the highest elevation?

La Paz sits in a canyon gouged into the Bolivian altiplano, with the city spilling down from the rim toward the valley floor and the neighbouring city of El Alto perched on the plateau above it. That canyon is the whole reason for the site: at these altitudes the plain is brutally exposed, and dropping several hundred metres into a sheltered bowl made the place noticeably warmer and more liveable, so the Spanish founded their settlement there in the sixteenth century on a route between the silver mines and the coast. Altitude shapes everything about the city. Visitors often need days to acclimatise, water boils well below its sea-level temperature so cooking takes longer, football teams dread playing there, and the steep topography made ordinary buses impractical enough that the city built an extensive network of cable cars as public transport. Bolivia's constitutional capital is Sucre, but La Paz holds the government and the legislature.

La Paz runs one of the world's largest urban cable-car networks because the gradients defeat conventional transit.