Santa Cruz de la Sierra, city of the Bolivian east, has been growing in the last decades at an uncontainable rate. The town of low houses and narrow streets has become a city of tall buildings and wide avenues where more than one and a half million inhabitants live. Modernity has penetrated the city, but despite the luxury shopping centers and supermarkets in the purest American style, the traditional popular markets that have been born are still standing, increasingly valid.

Located scattered throughout the city, popular markets are the center of supply of food and all kinds of products for the local population. It is the place where the freshly harvested food arrives in the countryside, the point of supply to supermarkets or directly to the consumer on foot. An apple or a truck full of them, everything is posible in the popular market.

In it, as in any other market in Bolivia, you can observe an intense movement, a chaotic dance of passers-by, street vendors and some other bandit, all to the beat of cumbias, boleros and cries of offers of calzones, onions or soaps. A strong smell of freshly cooked food - surely locro de gallina - attracts workers who need strength to continue working.

Buses, cars and trolleys transport people and goods at a frenetic pace, however, there is always time for friendly dialogue, or even to relax in some corner.

Thermometer of the political situation and the national economy. Life in their daily life, a hallmark of local identity, that is the popular market. A place where the dreams of the sellers and the wishes of the buyers meet to create something that goes beyond comercial exchange.