Sucre: The White City That Is the Most Overlooked Elopement Destination in South America

Every major South American travel blog has written the same list of elopement cities: Cartagena, Cusco, Buenos Aires, Patagonia. Sucre, Bolivia’s constitutional capital, appears on almost none of them. This is a planning error that couples willing to do slightly more research can take advantage of. Sucre is one of the best-preserved colonial cities in South America, its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the fact that it receives a fraction of the visitor traffic that Cusco or Cartagena does means that photographing a ceremony in the streets there looks the way destination elopement photography is supposed to look: intimate, uncluttered, specific to a place that most people have not yet discovered.

The White City

Sucre is called the White City because its historic buildings are whitewashed by municipal regulation. The effect when you walk the streets is extraordinary: a coherent palette of white buildings with terracotta roof tiles and carved stone doorways, all maintained to a standard that the more touristed colonial cities of Latin America have largely abandoned in favour of revenue. The Plaza 25 de Mayo is the formal centre, surrounded by the Cathedral Metropolitana and the Casa de la Libertad, but the most interesting work I do in Sucre is in the streets two or three blocks from the plaza in every direction, where the whitewashed walls and wooden balconies and carved lintels create compositions that I have not seen exhausted by other photographers because relatively few photographers work here.

Why Sucre Photographs Better Than You Expect

The whitewashed walls act as natural reflectors, which means the quality of light in Sucre’s streets is softer and more even than in cities where the buildings absorb rather than reflect. On an overcast day, the white architecture bounces diffuse light everywhere, eliminating the harsh shadows that make midday portrait work difficult elsewhere. On a sunny day, the reflected light fills the shadow sides of faces with warmth. I find that Sucre is one of the most technically forgiving portrait locations I work in because the environment is doing the lighting work that I would otherwise need to create with flash or reflectors. The city looks best in the mid-morning light when the sun is high enough to illuminate the facades but not yet overhead.

The Altitude and Access

Sucre is at 2,810 metres, which is notably lower than Uyuni or Titicaca and represents a more comfortable introduction to Bolivian altitude. Couples who plan a Bolivia itinerary combining Sucre with Uyuni should start in Sucre, which allows acclimatisation to a moderate altitude before ascending to the altiplano. Sucre has its own domestic airport with connections from La Paz, and the city is well-served for accommodation. The combination of Sucre’s colonial photography and the Salar de Uyuni’s open landscape in a single Bolivia trip creates a set of images that no single destination could produce: architecture and landscape, intimacy and scale, the human and the geological.