I became curious about how one builds such a large city in this setting: a place with geography similar to the Grand Canyon. I asked our guide, Mauricio, a trained architect about building practices in La Paz. He said that 65% of the land is very unstable. Engineers use a six-foot tall tripod and drop a weighted ball from the top of it. Then, by measuring the amount of land that has been disrupted, an engineer can design a way to stabilize a building on that site. As you can imagine, architects and structural engineers work together and building a stable, well-made dwelling space is quite expensive. Many people cannot afford this input or the construction methods, so if you look around the less affluent areas of La Paz you will find a fair amount of buildings which have shifted and have all sorts of structural problems.