Potosi was the site of one of the great colonial plunderings. Today, it’s a fair sized city located at 4090m altitude at the the base of Cerro Rico, a conical mountain that, at one time, was essentially full of silver. The Spanish discovered relatively minor Indigenous mining activities here in the 1500s and soon discovered that there was indeed a fortune beneath the ground. To this day the Spanish have a term, “to be worth a Potosi”, meaning to be worth a fortune.
The city, at its peak, was one of the biggest and richest cities in the world with a population of over 200 000. It has been estimated that approximately 41 000 metric tons of silver were extracted. For the work force it would have been an extremely difficult life. We were told that Indigenous and African slaves were used to mine and process the ore, the miners being forced to work below ground for 4 months at a time and that eight million slaves were thought to have died during the colonial period (Bolivia has a population of around 5 million).
Colonial era shaft….they don’t line the tunnels like this anymore.
Today, due to the dangerous condition of the mountain, the government has shut down official mining yet there remain thousands of miners organized into cooperatives who mine the mountain, of their own volition, for leftover silver, tin, lead and other minerals. The mountain is so riddled with tunnels that it is now a few hundred meters shorter than it was historically and is thought by some to be on the verge of collapsing in on itself. Taking a tour through the mine has given me cause to count my blessings. We met miners who had been below ground for 36 hours surviving on little more than water and coca leaves and carrying 50-60 kg bags of ore on their backs through kilometers of tunnels that were often no higher than 3 feet. You might expect such people to be miserable in their work, but rather, we encountered men who were very proud of themselves, their strength, their endurance, and their abilities. It was very humbling for this very soft and spoiled Canadian. For those of you taking a trip to Potosi, I would recommend Big Deal Tours. It’s run by former child miners who speak English very well. They gave us a great experience of the mines as well as the related processing plants.
Our next stop is Tupiza, one of the launching points for tours into the Salar de Uyuni and the Eduardo Avaroa Nature Reserve. Stay tuned.
To Love What is Lovely and Will Not Last 
