Coca Museum

One of the more interesting museums you'll find in La Paz, Bolivia is the Coca Museum, which is a popular museum among tourists.

At the Coca Museum you can learn all about the history and the use of the coca plant by the indigenous people of the Andes who have lived here for thousands of years.

The coca leaf is a very important part of Andean culture, and the plant was seen as sacred by the Incas. It is believed that people in the Andes have used coca leaves since 2500BC.

The museum also explains the many uses for the coca plant, such as alleviating altitude sickness and reducing hunger or tiredness. The Coca Museum offers alot of information from medical studies to the life of the coca growers to the use of the coca leaf by companies such as Coca Cola!

It also talks about the dark side of the plant which is cocaine and the drug industry. Coca is legal in Bolivia and Peru, because the leaf itself does no harm to you, it can be of great benefit and is not considered a drug. It is only the western hunger for cocaine that turns the plant into a drug.

For the indigenous people of the Andes the coca plant is of tremendous spiritual and historical significance. It is too bad that countries like the USA spend billions of dollars striving to ban and outlaw coca crops.

The Coca Museum was created in order to create awareness about the coca leaf and its derivative cocaine. The coca leaf is not a drug, in essence it isn’t much different than the popular stimulant in the US. The Coca Museum makes it very clear that the coca leaf is not cocaine (which needs to be created in a lab), but rather a natural remedy and tradition that has lasted for many years.

The Coca Museum is open Monday-Saturday from 10am-6pm. Admission into the museum costs 10 bolivianos and yes there are free samples of coca leaves for visitors to chew on!

Location: Calle Linares #906, www.cocamuseum.com