Welcome to these pages of information about the city and the department of Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the department (state) capital, was founded in 1560 and is now a center of rapid development. Santa Cruz is considered the economic center of the country thanks to its growing importance in agrobusiness, high tech industry, its expanding population and high rate of investment. Santa Cruz today has 1.5 million inhabitants. The department of Santa Cruz offers visitors a diversity of tourism destinations such as ecological parks, walks through pre-Incan ruins, and an ethno-tourism route in the Chiquitania. For lovers of nature, adventure, archeology, and history, Santa Cruz has it all.

The department of Santa Cruz is located in western Bolivia with a surface of 320,000 km2 (123,552 square miles) of which just one third is mountainous. The rest is a tropical paradise with exuberant vegetation, vast expanses of jungle and plains that form in the Amazonian lowlands.