The city was founded on February 3, 1894 with approximately 2,500 inhabitants who settled in the Colorado Canyon. Also known as the city of the four names: Barranca Colorada, La Cruz, Ribera-Alta and Riberalta. Since the mid-19th century, explorers and navigators in northwest Bolivia knew about a hut more than 30 meters high, erected and blessed by the confluence of two colossal rivers, which turned this municipality into the economic center of the north of the country.
On October 8, 1880, Edwin Heath baptized it with the name of Barranca Colorada. A few years later, the Braillard de Reyes house and its manager, Federico Bodo Claussen, informed of the barracks, sent a German subject with a hunt and resources to find the ravine and install a commercial factory there, which is how it received the name of La Cruz when Don Máximo Henicke surveyed on May 3, 1884 at 4:30 p.m., finding there a tapera or small house installed 2 years earlier in 1882 by Plácido Méndez. A little more than a year later, on July 7, 1885, Bodo Claussen baptized this city with the name of Ribera-Alta, a hiatus of natural origin that, by syneresis, was later simply Riberalta. Nine years
later on February 3, 1894, the National Delegate of the Colonies, Lisímaco Gutiérrez, carrying out orders from President Mariano Baptista and in honor of the birth of Mcal. Antonio José de Sucre founded it in an official act with the name of Villa Riberalta, when it had already been in real existence for 12 years.
Riberalta is a major global exporter of the Amazon almond (Bertholletia excelsa), also known as the Amazon nut or Brazil nut, with exports of US$ 192 million in 2015 and a volume of 25 thousand tons, according to United Nations statistics. (ITC Comtrade). The city also produces tropical woods, alluvial gold, rubber, and exotic Amazonian fruits (cupuazú, majo and motacú). It is the seat of the Apostolic Vicariate of the Department of Pando.
