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How tough are the ladies from Bolivia?

Not only are they able to carry most of their entire households on their backs while climbing steep mountains, they can also send people flying — all while wearing the traditional layered skirts, bowler hats and intricately embroidered shawls.

No one would want to mess with Bolivia’s cholitas , or female wrestlers.

Each Sunday, several wrestlers — men and women alike — in colorful costumes battle it out in a stadium at El Alto, a suburb of La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. The men have fancy stage names (Freddy Gruguer, Sexy Viper), while the female wrestlers employ more down to earth monikers (Jenifer, Yolanda and Remedios).

Loosely based on popular Western wrestling, these staged, choreographed freestyle fights have been entertaining Bolivian families for years.

Originally called “Titanes del Ring” (“Titans of the Ring”), it is now more famously known as “cholitas wrestling” because of the female wrestlers. Over the course of four hours, you get to see several Bolivian wrestlers battle it out with each other in seven mini-fights with only a short break between.

For this kind of entertainment, tourists have to pay twice the ticket price for admission compared to the locals. But this isn’t such a bad deal, as there are extra perks, such as ringside seats.

The first two rows of white plastic chairs are reserved for tourists, with priority going to those who come with a tour group. The locals sit on the bleachers behind them. A low fence separates the locals and the tourists, while another fence and a 1-meter gap separate the tourists from the ring.

The tourist ticket also comes with four tokens: one for a drink (an unidentified fizzy liquid in a plastic cup) and a snack (popcorn); another for a souvenir (a cholita figurine the size of a toddler’s thumb); and two tokens for the restroom.

That’s right, you’re only allowed two restroom visits during the four-hour extravaganza, gringo. The restrooms across the stadium, like the front row seats, are exclusively for tourists. After a long wait, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” finally blares from the cheap stereo system. This theme music would subsequently mark the beginning of a match between intervals.

The host, an elderly man in a suit with a bad comb-over, comes on stage. He makes several announcements and jokes around in Spanish. After he finishes, Village People’s “Macho Man” comes on as wrestler Sexy Viper — a pink scarf tied around his neck, leopard coat and heart-shaped headgear — greets spectators in the front row as the crowd hoots.

Sexy Viper’s nemesis, Angel de Infierno (Hell’s Angel), then enters the ring. Despite the name, Angel is wearing a silver mask and costume that looked more like a Japanese robot instead of the leather garb bikers prefer.

Angel and Sexy taunt each other, and after a signal from the referee, mayhem begins. They pummel, slam and twist each other’s body. While the whole thing is obviously choreographed, what they do still looks like it hurts.

After each match, peace is slightly restored to the stadium as the crowd uses this short break to recuperate from the spectacle by drinking more fizzy drinks and relaxing their jaws. A stray dog walks past on every interval, but he isn’t part of the act and looks genuinely perplexed when tourists try to lure him with popcorn, eager to pet him.

After enduring three male-on-male matches, the long-awaited lady wrestlers come out. Each wears traditional Bolivian dress, their long hair braided into a pair of strong pigtails. With their strappy sandals, these ladies look like they were going to church instead of a wrestling match.

As with the male wrestlers, they engage the crowd before entering the ring. They twirl and do a little dance as the crowd goes crazy. When they finally enter the ring, both try to get the crowd to side with them.

When the female referee signals them to fight, skirts go flying as they bounce off the ropes and jump on and headbutt each other with great acrobatic flair.

A wrestler is thrown out of the ring and her rival climbs the ropes before jumping onto the poor woman. The fight continues outside the ring, close to where the audience is seated. Adding more excitement, the referee doesn’t stay neutral and even jumps in. She laughs menacingly and grabs a wrestler’s legs, nailing her to the ground.

It is now two against one. The highlight of this match is when one of the women wraps her pigtail around the other’s neck and mock-chokes her opponent. This is after the fight once again spills out of the ring and the women have to be separated by a gentleman in a tracksuit who looks like their coach.

Screams and slaps boom from inside the decrepit stadium as the crowd continues to jeer. The female wrestlers have made their male counterparts look like wimps.

Nothing could top that, right? Well, the last act can, when the cholitas join forces with the male wrestlers, forming a group of two and facing off for an epic battle.

Most women would scream with joy, or grimace in horror, to see a particularly fierce cholita who makes her male partner wear her shiny, purple skirt and attacks the male wrestler responsible for throwing her partner out of the ring.

After getting rid of her partner, the challenger slams her on the floor. But this party does not last long as the guy in the skirt comes back into the ring to lunge head-first toward the offender.

After that, they focus their attention on the challenger’s teammate, the other cholita, who is crushed after she knees her opponent’s groin. The poor woman’s pigtails are now a bit disheveled, her face contorted in pain after being caught in a headlock and slammed onto the ring.

Her archenemy grabs a 1.5-liter soda bottle from a tourist and knocks the opponent over the head with it. Now that this cholita had been incapacitated, the other two again focus their wrath on her teammate.

For some unknown reason, the referee — a keen-eyed spectator would notice that this referee was in fact the wrestler with a KISS costume from the fight before — gets agitated, joins the fight and beats up random wrestlers.

Mayhem ensues on stage. As the fight moves to the gap between the ring and the front row seats, some tourists start to flee the scene. People begin to throw popcorn at the wrestlers. Suddenly, the referee grabs another bottle, opens it, and sprays its contents maniacally toward the audience, makes people shriek and laugh.

With that, the crude, amateurish, absolutely campy spectacle of Bolivian cholitas wrestling comes to its explosive close. The crowd filters out with sticky hair from the soda spray, their tummies and jaws aching from too much laughter. Just another Sunday night in Bolivia.