How many metres above sea level is La Paz, Bolivia?

How to get close to this number

Compare it to a mountain you know. La Paz sits higher than most of the ski resorts in the Alps and higher than a great many named European peaks — not a town in the hills, but a full city with traffic, hospitals and office blocks at an altitude where visitors get short of breath walking uphill. Starting from a mountain rather than from a city is what gets the order of magnitude right.

Guesses come in low because the mental category is wrong. "City" implies a valley, a river and a coastline, because that is where cities usually are, and the height of a place is not something you can read off a photograph of streets. Once you accept that this is a city built where you would otherwise expect a summit, the estimate moves up to where it belongs.

One caveat about the figure: La Paz is built into a canyon and spreads over an enormous vertical range, so a single altitude is a reference point rather than a description. Neighbourhoods at the rim sit hundreds of metres above those on the floor, and the adjoining city of El Alto is higher still. The oxygen figure in the explanation is what actually matters in daily life, and it is the reason the football complaints have lasted decades.