This is taken from The Guardian, Wednesday January 9, 2008:

Lola Almudevar
BBC journalist, she became a freelance reporter in Bolivia

by Lisa Wood

Many a Friday night for the past few months, work permitting, the journalist Lola Almudevar, who has died aged 29, would meet several elderly Jews in the Bolivian capital La Paz to celebrate Shabbat and natter about life and local politics. I knew Lola for all of her brief life and I take delight in that image. She made herself at home wherever she went; she had a huge appetite for life and an instinctive empathy with other people.

Lola was killed in a road accident south of La Paz, on her way to report on political disturbances in Sucre. Earlier in the year she had left her job at BBC Midlands to report from South America as a freelance. She travelled through Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, and filed often wry human interest stories to a number of newspapers, including the Guardian. Then she found the opportunity she was looking for in Bolivia.

There was a big political story unfolding following the election of President Evo Morales last year. Lola got an exclusive interview with Morales and sold it to the BBC, which took a number of her stories, including three pieces for Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. She also contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Jewish Chronicle, the World Service and BBC Mundo in Spain. She was having the time of her life.

Lola was born in London to a Spanish psychiatrist father and a British-born mother, the child of emigre German Jews who survived the Holocaust. The family moved to the East Midlands when she was small. Her English stepfather and a Nottingham upbringing contributed to a rich environment in which Lola and her sister Becca were encouraged to explore their creativity. She attended Colonel Frank Seely school, in Calverton, and, membership of BBYO, the Jewish youth organisation was an important part of her teenage life.

Upon deciding that she wanted to become a journalist, Lola charmed her way on to local, national and specialist publications during school and university holidays - her work experience included stints on the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent and the Yorkshire Post. She wrote for Searchlight, the anti-Nazi organisation, tried radio, at Five Live, and helped sort out locations at ZKK, the independent film production company.

In 1999, following her graduation from Leeds University, where she read European studies, Lola won the Young European of the Year award, given by the Heinz-Schwarzkopf Foundation and the European parliament, for her work in promoting understanding among young people from different cultures. I was there when she accepted her prize and told her largely German audience what it felt like to be a British, Spanish, Jewish, Nottingham girl in modern Europe. It was a theme she returned to when she visited Berlin, the pre-war home of her grandparents. In an article for the Financial Times in 2000, she wrote of confronting her family's Holocaust memories and putting them to rest for herself.

After working in Brussels for the MEPs Glenys Kinnock and Richard Howitt, Lola returned to Britain in 2002 when she won a BBC traineeship. After starting on BBC Hereford and Worcester, she moved to BBC WM, the West Midlands radio service, and was rapidly promoted to senior broadcast journalist at Midlands Today. Last year, she and fellow BBC video journalist, Brady Haran, won an award for their co-production of Alexander Road, a 10-part series following the residents of a road in Wolverhampton. Before leaving for South America, she was working on longer format films for the regional current affairs programme Inside Out.

Lola was full of ideas for stories. Her PC, retrieved from Bolivia, is loaded with them. All are carefully indexed in terms of commissions, priority and deadlines - attention to such detail was one of the reasons commissioning editors held her in high regard. She was a remarkable person, beautiful and bold, touching lives and lighting up the room wherever she went, capable of partying the night away but never losing her professional focus. She was loved by friends, colleagues and family. Her mother, father, stepfather and sister survive her.

Rory Carroll writes: Lola Almudevar crackled with energy, imagination and cheer when pitching and writing stories about Bolivia for the Guardian. She transmitted a sense of joy about her job and the country which was infectious.

What might have been a backwater of the Latin America beat became impossible to ignore when Lola would pop up somewhere with yet another fascinating tale and file it from a dusty, sticky internet cafe keyboard. Not for her the air-conditioned hotels of La Paz. On assignment she would get on a bus packed with ordinary Bolivians, talk to them, end up God knew where, then make her readers and listeners care as much about Bolivia as she did. She is sorely missed.

· Louise Lauren "Lola" Stoppleman de Almudevar, journalist, born June 28 1978; died November 25 2007