The Richest City in the Americas, Built on the Deadliest Worksite in History
In 1573, the Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, signed a decree establishing what Spanish administrators called the mita: a rotating forced-labor system that would send 13,500 indigenous men at a time from sixteen Andean provinces up to the silver mines of Potosí. Each conscript was required to serve four months. The radius of conscription eventually reached 1,600 kilometers. Entire villages emptied out when the mita rotation came due. Families walked alongside their men for weeks across the altiplano carrying their own food, because the Spanish would not feed them on the journey. When they reached the mountain, the men went down into the tunnels. Many did not come back up.
By the seventeenth century, Potosí was producing roughly 60 percent of all silver mined on Earth. The city above the mine had 160,000 inhabitants — more than Madrid, more than Paris, more than any city in the Western Hemisphere. Spanish chroniclers described silver-heeled shoes, gold-thread tapestries, eighty-six churches with gilt altars, an opera house, and a royal mint that stamped the coins underwriting European wars for a century. The peso de a ocho — the piece of eight, cut from Potosí silver — became the first truly global reserve currency. It financed the Spanish Empire from Manila to Flanders. It paid the Dutch bankers who loaned the Habsburgs into their wars. It reached as far east as China, where Ming dynasty merchants accepted it in preference to their own currency.
Potosí is the founding site of global capitalism, and the hidden cost on which it was built. Between 1545 and roughly 1825, somewhere between three and eight million indigenous and African workers died in its mines and refineries. The city that sits on the mountain today is poorer than it was in 1650. The mountain is still being worked. Children still enter its tunnels. Potosí is the oldest industrial frontier in the Americas, and the one that never moved on.
The Andean World Before the Silver Rush
Cerro Rico Before Spanish Arrival and the Inca Who Walked Away From It
The mountain the Spanish would call Cerro Rico rises to 4,824 meters on the southern Bolivian altiplano, a conical red peak streaked with mineral oxidation that turns rust-orange in afternoon light. The indigenous Aymara and Quechua of the region knew the mountain was full of metal. They did not mine it. According to an Inca chronicle recorded by Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century, the Inca emperor Huayna Capac had once ordered excavations at the peak in the late fifteenth century. A voice from within the mountain told the workers to leave the silver alone, that it was not meant for them but for others who would come later. Whether the story is history, retrofitted legend, or simply an Aymara reading of the conquest after the fact, the Inca did not systematically exploit the deposit.
The Inca capital at Cuzco drew its silver from smaller mines at Porco, about thirty kilometers away. Cerro Rico sat in the imperial periphery, known and noted but not dug. When Spanish conquistadors began filtering into the southern Andes in the late 1530s, they passed through the region without registering what lay beneath their feet. The altiplano at those elevations was harsh, cold, agriculturally marginal, and dominated by llama herders and subsistence farmers. It took a sheep to reveal the mountain.
The 1545 Strike and Diego Gualpa's Accidental Discovery
The conventional account of the discovery of Potosí concerns an Andean herder named Diego Gualpa. Most sources place the date at 1545, about twelve years after Cajamarca had delivered the Inca empire into Spanish hands. Gualpa was either chasing a runaway llama or gathering firewood on the slopes of Cerro Rico — the two versions of the story disagree — when he uprooted a shrub and exposed a vein of nearly pure silver ore running close to the surface.
Gualpa tried to keep the find secret. His Spanish employer, a miner at Porco named Juan de Villarroel, learned of it within weeks. Villarroel registered the claim with the Spanish colonial authorities at Cuzco. Word spread along the imperial road network that had, a generation earlier, carried Atahualpa's ransom north to Cajamarca. By early 1546, a makeshift camp of Spanish prospectors and indigenous workers had appeared on the flank of the mountain. Within five years, the camp was a town. Within twenty, it was a city of tens of thousands. Within a century, it was the richest urban center in the Western Hemisphere.
How a Mountain at 4,800 Meters Became the Richest Place on Earth
The geology of Cerro Rico is what made Potosí possible. The mountain is a volcanic dome heavily mineralized by hydrothermal activity, with silver concentrated in thick veins running through dozens of discrete ore bodies. In the first decades of exploitation, the richest veins were so pure that ore could be smelted with only basic processing. Spanish chroniclers reported silver content of up to 50 percent in the best early samples. Workers chipped the ore out with hand tools, carried it down the mountain in leather sacks, and processed it in primitive native-style wind-powered furnaces called huayras, small clay kilns that worked because the altitude provided reliable strong winds.
The altitude itself was the main engineering problem. At 4,000 meters, oxygen levels are roughly 60 percent of what they are at sea level. Mortar does not set properly. Food spoils differently. Draft animals die younger. Humans not acclimatized from birth suffer altitude sickness, reduced cognitive function, and chronic respiratory problems. The Spanish solved none of these problems. They simply threw enough bodies at the mountain that the work continued regardless. For almost three centuries, that arithmetic worked in Madrid's favor.
Building the City of Silver at 4,000 Meters
Potosí in 1600: The First Global Boomtown in the Americas
By 1600, Potosí had roughly 120,000 inhabitants. By 1650, the city reached its peak population of approximately 160,000 — larger than Seville, larger than Rome, larger than Amsterdam. A European chronicler visiting in the 1620s described streets where Andalusian merchants sold Chinese silk brought across the Pacific through Manila, where Flemish lace trimmed the dresses of miners' wives, where African musicians played in taverns alongside Andalusian bullfighters, and where Quechua was heard on every corner. The city's formal name was the Imperial City of Potosí — a title granted directly by the Spanish crown in 1553, before many cities in Spain itself had been afforded the same distinction.
The urban fabric that grew up below the mountain was not a colonial settlement in the usual sense. It was an industrial complex bolted to a mining operation. Refineries ran in an unbroken line along the Ribera stream, which had been channeled and dammed to drive water-powered stamping mills. Tens of thousands of llamas moved ore, mercury, and supplies between the mine heads, the refineries, and the warehouses. A separate district at the foot of the mountain housed the indigenous workforce — a shantytown that grew and shrank with the mita rotation, with its own churches, markets, and taverns, deliberately segregated from the Spanish core.
The Casa de la Moneda and the Birth of the Spanish Silver Peso
The Casa de la Moneda — the royal mint of Potosí — was established in 1572 by order of Viceroy Toledo. It was one of the most important economic institutions of the entire early-modern world. For roughly 250 years, the mint stamped the silver of Cerro Rico into coins that circulated from Antwerp to Osaka. The peso de a ocho, the eight-real piece known in English as the Spanish dollar or piece of eight, became the de facto international currency of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British pound, the United States dollar, the Mexican peso, and the Chinese yuan all trace their monetary ancestry, directly or indirectly, to the coinage system perfected at Potosí.
The current building on the Plaza 10 de Noviembre is the second Casa de la Moneda, constructed between 1753 and 1773 as an industrial facility occupying roughly a city block. Its interior still contains the original mule-powered rolling mills, coining presses, and smelting furnaces used to mint silver into standardized weights. Walking through the building today is walking through the physical machinery that underwrote three centuries of European finance. A Spanish saying from the seventeenth century captured what this meant: vale un Potosí — it is worth a Potosí — used the way modern English uses "it is worth a fortune." The phrase has survived in Spanish into the twenty-first century.
The Eighty-Six Churches, the Opera House, and the Silver-Heeled Shoes
The visible wealth of Potosí at its peak is difficult to overstate. Spanish visitors in the seventeenth century counted 86 churches inside the city. The Church of San Francisco was built with altar plating of solid silver. The Convent of Santa Teresa held a dowry vault of gold and silver liturgical objects valued at several hundred thousand pesos — at a time when a skilled European tradesman earned perhaps 50 pesos a year. The city's residents staged operas, bullfights, and religious processions on a scale that rivaled Madrid. One 1623 wedding procession for a local mine owner's daughter laid silver ingots along the entire route from the bride's home to the cathedral, roughly half a kilometer, as a display of wealth.
Women of the Spanish elite wore shoes with silver heels. Their horses were shod with silver. Silver chamber pots appeared in the inventories of wealthy households. The ironic corollary of the metal's abundance was that it had become, locally, less valuable than gold — gold had to be imported, silver was simply scraped from the mountain. No other city in the Americas, before or since, has produced this kind of documented commodity excess. And none has produced it on top of a human cost as systematically obscured.
The Mita and the Industrial Consumption of Indigenous Labor
Viceroy Toledo's 1573 Labor Decree and the Four-Month Death Rotation
Francisco de Toledo arrived in Peru as viceroy in 1569 with a mandate from Philip II to rationalize the colony's economy. He concluded within a few years that the silver of Potosí could not be extracted at scale through voluntary wage labor — the work was too dangerous, the altitude too extreme, the pay too poor. In 1573 he institutionalized what had existed in rougher forms under the Inca, repurposing the pre-Columbian labor-rotation system known as the mita into an instrument of industrial extraction.
The Toledan mita required sixteen highland provinces, spanning a radius of up to 1,600 kilometers around Potosí, to supply a rotating quota of indigenous men. Every seventh adult male from each affected community was drafted for a four-month shift in the mines. The total active workforce at any given time was 13,500 conscripts. The Spanish called them mitayos. Each mitayo was paid, at least nominally, a small wage — enough to cover food but not the journey home. Spanish records from the period show that most mitayos arrived at Potosí already in poor condition from the walk, sometimes a month or more on foot across the altiplano, and that desertion, death in transit, and family disintegration were endemic to the system.
The four-month rotation was not a protection. It was an admission. Spanish administrators understood that longer shifts killed workers faster than the villages could replace them. The mita was calibrated to extract the maximum sustainable yield of labor before the conscripts either died or became too damaged to work. Many mitayos served multiple rotations across their lives. Some served until they died.
The Amalgamation Process and the Mercury That Poisoned the Andes
The silver ore at Potosí was rich but required processing. In 1555, the Spanish chemist Bartolomé de Medina had developed, in Mexico, an amalgamation process using mercury to separate silver from crushed ore. The technique reached Potosí in the 1570s and became the standard industrial method for the next three centuries. Crushed ore was mixed with mercury on stone-paved courtyards called patios, worked by foot or by mule for weeks, then heated to vaporize the mercury and leave pure silver behind.
The mercury came from the Huancavelica mine in central Peru, 1,400 kilometers north of Potosí. Huancavelica itself was a parallel labor-death spiral — the mine killed workers through mercury vapor inhalation at rates comparable to Potosí itself. Historians have estimated that roughly 45,000 metric tons of mercury were consumed at Potosí between 1570 and 1810. The vapor from the patios drifted over the workforce. The tailings contaminated the soil and water of the Ribera basin. Modern soil sampling in Potosí shows mercury concentrations hundreds of times above background levels, a contamination signature still traceable in the glacial ice of the Andean peaks downwind.
Mitayos working the patios suffered acute mercury poisoning. Symptoms included tremors, tooth loss, kidney failure, psychosis, and death. The Spanish medical literature of the period documented the symptoms without changing the process. Mercury was expensive. Labor, under the mita, was not.
Working Conditions Inside the Mountain and the Human Toll
Conditions inside the tunnels were worse than on the surface. Mitayos descended into the mountain on shifts of up to eighteen hours, climbing down rawhide ladders or cut-rock steps carrying hundred-pound leather sacks of ore on their backs. The main galleries ran at 45°C with near-100 percent humidity. Candles and oil lamps consumed what little oxygen the altitude already rationed. Silica dust from the ore scarred lungs permanently. Cave-ins killed workers in single incidents by the dozens. Spanish administrators kept records of some fatalities, but the death toll from chronic silicosis, pneumonia, mercury poisoning, and untreated injuries was never systematically counted. Contemporary estimates placed the cumulative indigenous death toll from the Potosí system across its centuries of operation at between three and eight million people. The range is wide because much of the mortality occurred after the workers returned to their villages, where they died of mine-acquired disease without appearing in Spanish ledgers.
The Augustinian friar Domingo de Santo Tomás, who inspected the Potosí mines in the 1550s, wrote in a letter to the Spanish Council of the Indies that the mountain was "a mouth of hell, into which a great mass of people enter every year and are sacrificed by the greed of the Spaniards to their god." His letter was archived. The mita continued for another two and a half centuries.
The African Slave Trade and the Second Labor Force
Why Toledo Brought Enslaved Africans to a 4,000-Meter Altitude
The Spanish initially believed that enslaved Africans would be a more efficient mining workforce than indigenous conscripts. Africans were already being transported to the Caribbean and coastal Peru in large numbers for sugar plantation labor. Toledo and subsequent viceroys arranged for shipments of enslaved Africans to be brought overland to Potosí beginning in the 1570s. The experiment largely failed. High-altitude hypoxia killed African workers at catastrophic rates during acclimatization. Many died within weeks of arriving. The economics of slave transport — thousands of kilometers overland from Buenos Aires or across the Andes from Lima — made each individual investment expensive.
The Spanish response was to redirect enslaved African labor to the refineries and auxiliary operations at lower elevation rather than the high tunnels themselves. By the early seventeenth century, roughly 30,000 enslaved Africans were present in Potosí, working the amalgamation patios, the stamp mills, the forges, the transport trains, and the domestic economy of the city. They died at rates lower than mitayos in the mines but still catastrophically high by any normal standard, primarily from mercury exposure, pneumonia, and silicosis.
Life and Death in the Refineries Below the Mountain
The amalgamation patios of Potosí, strung along the Ribera stream, were an industrial zone that absorbed tens of thousands of workers across the city's peak centuries. Enslaved Africans worked alongside mitayos and Spanish technicians in a hierarchy that was racially stratified but collectively deadly. Contemporary accounts describe the patios at night lit by bonfires under the amalgamation vessels, the air thick with mercury vapor, the workers coughing and trembling from chronic exposure. The ore-crushing stamp mills generated a continuous mechanical roar that could be heard from the city center several kilometers away.
Enslaved Africans in Potosí existed in the documentary record mostly as names in sale contracts, baptismal registers, and occasional manumission cases. The community they formed at the base of the mountain — culturally distinct, musically influential, organized around confraternities attached to the city's churches — shaped the syncretic religious and musical traditions that survive in the region today. The saya rhythm performed annually at Potosí's Carnival celebration descends directly from these enslaved communities. Their descendants remain a visible population in the Yungas valleys east of the altiplano, where the slave system eventually relocated once the mining boom faded.
Decline, Independence, and the Long Tail of Extraction
The Collapse of Silver Prices and Potosí's Slow Hollowing
Potosí's peak lasted roughly a century. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the richest surface veins had been exhausted. The silver being extracted required progressively deeper tunnels, more expensive mercury, and more labor per unit of output. Global silver prices also began to collapse under the weight of Potosí's own over-production — the flood of Spanish-American silver into European and Asian markets had driven what economic historians call the Price Revolution, a sustained inflation across Eurasia that eroded the real value of each additional ingot.
By 1750, the city's population had fallen below 70,000. By 1800, it was around 30,000. The mint continued to operate, but output was a fraction of peak levels. The mita was formally abolished in 1812 during the final years of Spanish colonial rule, partly on humanitarian grounds and partly because the conscript system had been hollowing out the Andean villages so severely that the colonial tax base itself was shrinking.
Bolivian Independence and the Tin Era That Followed Silver
Bolivia declared independence from Spain in 1825 and named itself after Simón Bolívar. Potosí was incorporated into the new republic as a provincial capital. The silver industry staggered on through the nineteenth century without its conscript labor force, increasingly overshadowed by new extraction economies. Tin replaced silver as the dominant metal of the region in the late nineteenth century. The Patiño, Aramayo, and Hochschild tin-mining families became the new industrial aristocracy of Bolivia, wealthier in their era than the Spanish silver barons had been in theirs. Potosí itself became a secondary site. The action moved to Oruro, La Paz, and the tin veins of the northern altiplano.
The twentieth century brought a series of labor revolts, nationalizations, and partial privatizations. The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 nationalized the largest mines and expropriated the tin magnates. By the 1980s, collapsing global metal prices and International Monetary Fund restructuring had gutted the state mining company. Tens of thousands of miners were laid off. Many returned to cooperative mining — small self-organized worker collectives that leased concessions from the state and worked the old tunnels on a subsistence basis.
The Twentieth Century and the Cooperative Miners Who Stayed
The cooperative miner system that took shape in Potosí after the 1985 IMF-imposed restructuring is still the dominant labor regime on Cerro Rico today. Roughly 15,000 to 20,000 cooperative miners work inside the mountain at any given time, organized into dozens of worker-owned cooperatives that hold concession rights to specific tunnel sections. Pay is directly tied to extracted tonnage. Safety equipment is minimal. Oversight is mostly absent. The state collects royalties. The miners take what they can dig.
The political economy of the cooperative system is a kind of inheritance of everything that came before. The Spanish mita paid mitayos a nominal wage that could not cover subsistence. The tin era concentrated wealth in a few export families while paying underground workers piece-rate. The cooperative era distributes the risk and the deprivation across the workforce itself, leaving the miners as nominal owners of an operation that continues to kill them. The continuity across five centuries is not metaphorical. It is a continuity of the same tunnel walls, the same dust, the same mountain.
Cerro Rico Today and the Industrial Frontier That Never Closed
The Cooperative Miners and the Statistics Nobody Publishes
Life expectancy for a cooperative miner working inside Cerro Rico is significantly shorter than the Bolivian national average. Most estimates place it at around 40 to 50 years for miners with more than a decade of underground experience. The primary cause of death is silicosis — the progressive scarring of lung tissue from inhaled silica dust, which has no cure and progresses until the lungs can no longer support oxygenation. Tuberculosis rates among the workforce are elevated by a similar factor. Accidents from cave-ins, gas leaks, and unregulated use of dynamite kill dozens of miners each year, though precise figures are not systematically published by either the cooperatives or the Bolivian state.
The mining work itself has changed less than one might expect across five centuries. Modern miners still use dynamite and hand tools in galleries that are often unreinforced. They still carry ore out in sacks. The air inside the deeper sections of the mountain still reaches 45°C and is still laced with silica, arsenic, and residual mercury from earlier refining. The miners chew coca leaves continuously underground, both to suppress appetite and to cope with altitude. Small figurines of El Tío — a horned, tobacco-smoking devil figure understood as the lord of the underworld — sit in wall niches throughout the mine, receiving daily offerings of cigarettes, alcohol, and coca.
Child Labor Inside Cerro Rico and the Silicosis Generation
Children work in the cooperative mines. Bolivian law technically prohibits underground labor under the age of eighteen. The Cerro Rico cooperatives technically comply. In practice, thousands of boys aged twelve to seventeen work inside the mountain as helpers to older relatives, cleaning tunnels, carrying tools, hauling ore. Younger children appear in the surface operations — sorting ore at the refinery entrances, assisting the cooperative administrators, running messages. The International Labour Organization and UNICEF have documented the pattern for decades without materially changing it. The economic reality is that a miner earning a marginal income cannot support a family without the children also contributing, and the only work available to a child of a cooperative miner is, almost invariably, more mining.
A generation of boys who enter the mountain in their early teens develops silicosis in their twenties. Miners describe their lungs visibly deteriorating on chest X-rays they cannot usually afford to obtain. Sons of miners die younger than their fathers did, because they started earlier. The statistic has become grimly routine in regional public health reporting. It has not yet changed the labor system that produces it.
The Mountain That Is Literally Collapsing Into Itself
Cerro Rico has been tunneled so extensively across five centuries that the mountain itself is structurally compromised. Geological surveys conducted by the Bolivian government and international consultants between 2011 and 2018 documented that the summit of the mountain is subsiding — sinking measurably year by year into the honeycomb of tunnels beneath it. The peak has lost an estimated several dozen meters of elevation since the sixteenth century, a combination of mining removal and structural settlement. Sinkholes have appeared on the upper flanks. The visible silhouette of Cerro Rico from the city below is no longer the same silhouette that Spanish chroniclers sketched in the seventeenth century.
UNESCO, which designated the historic city and mountain as a World Heritage Site in 1987, placed Potosí on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2014 precisely because of the progressive destruction of Cerro Rico itself. Recommendations to consolidate tunnels, limit extraction above certain elevations, and stabilize the summit have been made repeatedly. Implementation has been minimal. The cooperative miners need the work. The state needs the royalties. The mountain continues to be taken apart.
Visiting Potosí Today
The Colonial Core, the Casa de la Moneda, and the Cathedral
Potosí today is a city of roughly 175,000 people, sitting on the altiplano at 4,067 meters — the highest major city in the world. The colonial core is compact and concentrated around the Plaza 10 de Noviembre. The Cathedral Basilica of Potosí, rebuilt several times since the sixteenth century, sits on the north side of the plaza with a neoclassical facade added in the nineteenth century. The Casa de la Moneda occupies the west side of the plaza and is now a museum. Visitors can walk through the original smelting rooms, the rolling mills, and the coining presses that stamped several billion pesos of silver between 1773 and the early twentieth century. The building is vast, cold, and stubbornly industrial — a reminder that colonial Potosí was not a decorative city but a factory.
The Convent of Santa Teresa, a short walk east, preserves the dowry vault system of colonial Spanish Catholicism in remarkable detail. The Torre de la Compañía de Jesús, a baroque bell tower from the Jesuit church, offers the best urban viewing platform over the city's roofs toward Cerro Rico, which looms above the southern horizon. Local guides can point out the neighborhoods that correspond to the former mitayo districts, the refineries along the old course of the Ribera, and the routes by which llama caravans once moved silver down from the mountain.
Mine Tours, Ethics, and What to Know Before Going Inside Cerro Rico
Several agencies in Potosí offer tours of working cooperative mines inside Cerro Rico. The tours are controversial. Supporters argue that they provide supplementary income to the cooperatives, raise international awareness of the working conditions, and keep the city's economic base slightly more diverse. Critics argue that they constitute a form of poverty tourism, that the presence of tourists inside working tunnels can create additional safety risks, and that the spectacle of a foreign traveler photographing a Bolivian miner at work does not change the structural conditions that put the miner in the tunnel.
Visitors considering a tour should understand what they are agreeing to. The tours descend several hundred meters into active working tunnels. The altitude outside is already above 4,000 meters; the exertion required to move through the mine is substantial. Heat, dust, and gas exposure during the tour is real, though limited. The standard practice is for tour groups to bring gifts of coca leaves, cigarettes, and soft drinks for the miners they encounter underground — not as payment but as a minimal gesture of reciprocity in a working environment that tolerates the intrusion. Photographs of miners should be requested individually, not assumed.
Cerro Rico does not offer consolation. The mountain at close quarters is a reminder that the wealth that built European banking, Andean baroque architecture, and the modern global currency system came from bodies that were expended rather than compensated, and that the system producing those bodies has been modified but not ended. Visitors who go inside the mountain owe it the same attention they would owe a battlefield — though this battlefield is still active, the casualties are still being taken, and the conflict that produced them is five hundred years old and not yet resolved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Potosí and how do you get there?
Potosí sits on the southern Bolivian altiplano at 4,067 meters, making it the highest major city in the world. The most common access routes for visitors are by road from Sucre (about 3 hours by bus), Uyuni (about 4 hours, usually combined with a salt flats trip), or La Paz (roughly 10 hours by overnight bus). The city has a small airport but limited commercial flights. The altitude is genuinely extreme — visitors should acclimatize in Sucre or La Paz before arriving, drink coca tea, and avoid alcohol in the first 24 hours to reduce the risk of altitude sickness.
How much silver came out of Potosí?
Spanish colonial records and subsequent historical research estimate that roughly 60,000 metric tons of silver were extracted from Cerro Rico between 1545 and the end of the colonial period in 1825. For most of the seventeenth century, Potosí alone accounted for around 60 percent of all silver mined on Earth. The silver financed the Spanish Empire across three continents, underwrote European banking from Antwerp to Genoa, flowed east to pay for Chinese silk and porcelain, and established the Spanish peso as the first global reserve currency.
How many people died working in Potosí?
Historians estimate the cumulative death toll across nearly three centuries of colonial operation at between three and eight million indigenous and African workers. The range is wide because much of the mortality occurred after mitayos returned to their villages and died from mine-acquired silicosis, mercury poisoning, and tuberculosis without being recorded in Spanish ledgers. Direct deaths from cave-ins, mercury exposure in the refineries, and acute altitude illness were catastrophic but counted more reliably. The mita labor system that supplied most of this workforce operated from 1573 until 1812.
What was the mita system?
The mita was a rotating forced-labor system formalized by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1573. It required sixteen Andean provinces, spanning up to 1,600 kilometers around Potosí, to supply a quota of indigenous men — 13,500 conscripts active at any given time. Each mitayo served a four-month rotation in the mines before being replaced. Workers were paid a nominal wage that generally did not cover subsistence, and the forced journey to and from the mountain destroyed families and depopulated the source communities. The system continued for 239 years.
Can you still visit the mines?
Yes. Several agencies in Potosí offer guided tours of working cooperative mines inside Cerro Rico. The tours descend into active tunnels where miners are still extracting tin, zinc, and residual silver using methods that have changed less than one might expect since the colonial era. Visitors should understand that the mines are working industrial sites with real safety hazards — heat above 40°C, silica dust, poor ventilation, and occasional dynamite use nearby. The tours are controversial on ethical grounds and require physical preparation at altitude. Bringing gifts of coca leaves, cigarettes, and drinks for the miners encountered underground is standard practice.
Why is Cerro Rico on UNESCO's endangered list?
UNESCO designated Potosí and Cerro Rico as a World Heritage Site in 1987, recognizing the city's colonial architecture and the mountain's historical significance. In 2014, the site was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger because the mountain itself is structurally collapsing. Five centuries of continuous tunneling have hollowed out Cerro Rico so extensively that the summit is measurably subsiding each year, sinkholes have appeared on the upper flanks, and the peak has lost several dozen meters of elevation since the sixteenth century. The extraction continues because the cooperative miners depend on it and the Bolivian state collects royalties from it.
Sources
- Kris Lane — Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World, University of California Press (2019)
- Jeffrey A. Cole — The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes, Stanford University Press (1985)
- Kenneth J. Andrien — Mountains of Silver and Rivers of Gold: The Story of Colonial Latin America, Westview Press (1999)
- Eduardo Galeano — Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Monthly Review Press (1973)
- Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela — Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, originally completed 1736; Brown University Press edition (1965)
- Peter Bakewell — Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650, University of New Mexico Press (1984)
- Paul Gootenberg — Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru, Princeton University Press (1989)
- Nicholas A. Robins — Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes, Indiana University Press (2011)
- Michael Taussig — The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, University of North Carolina Press (1980)
- June Nash — We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, Columbia University Press (1979)
- UNESCO — World Heritage Committee: State of Conservation Report, City of Potosí (2014, updated 2020)
- International Labour Organization — Child Labour in Bolivian Mining: Country Report (2015)
