Cochabamba street market

Cochabamba is a city in central Bolivia, located in a valley bearing the same name in the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cochabamba Department and is the fourth largest city in Bolivia with an urban population of 608,276 (2008) and a metropolitan population of more than 1,000,000 people. The name derives from a compound of the Quechua words qucha, meaning "lake", and pampa, "open plain". Residents of the city and surrounding areas are commonly referred to as Cochabambinos. Cochabamba is known as the "City of Eternal Spring" and "The Garden City" due to its spring-like temperatures year round. It is also known as "La Llajta", "town" in Quechua.

The city is also host to the first World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

This article is about the demographic features of the population of Bolivia, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.

Since Bolivia was created as a state on its own in 1825 it has been a multiethnical society, which means that it is home to people of a lot of different ethnical backgrounds. As a result, the local Bolivians tend to treat their nationality as a citizenship instead of an ethnicity. The largest of the approximately three dozen indigenous Amerindian groups are the Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitanos, Guaraní (Chiriguanos, Guarayos), and Mojeños. The majority of white Bolivians are of Spanish descent, including Basque origin, but there are small German (including Mennonite), Croats, Asian (notably Japanese Okinawans relocated there after expropriation of farmland by the U.S. military after World War II [1]), Middle Eastern, and other minorities (Afro Bolivian), many of whose members descend from families that have lived in Bolivia for several generations.

South America has an estimated population of 385 million (as of 2005) and a rate of population growth of about 0.6% per year.^{[citation needed]}