History
According to legend, the Inca Huayna Capac was on the point of mining silver in 1462 when a voice from above told him that he should leave it where it was because it was for someone else. The Inca then referred to the area as Ppotojsi, Quechua for ruin or spoil. According to another version, Huayna Capac described the voice as photoj nin (a great din). Another story says the name comes from the Aymara-Quechua word Ppotoj, meaning spring, from the numerous springs in and around the city. Yet another that it is from Potocchi (source of silver).
Further legend says the silver was discovered in 1544 by Diego Huallpa who had lost some llamas and climbed Sumaj Orcko, as Cerro Rico was then called. It got late, he got cold and so made a fire, which by morning had smelted a vein of silver. Huallpa told his mate Chalco (or Guanca) about the silver and they started mining. However, Chalco told the Spanish, who promptly arrived taking possession of the mountain and founding the city in 1545 as the ‘Villa Imperial de Carlos V’. The official shield of the city carries the words “Soy el rico Potosí, del mundo soy el tesoro; soy el rey de los montes, envidia soy de los reyes” (I am rich Potosí, the treasure of the world; the king of mountains, the envy of kings).
The rise of Potosí
Within 18 months of the Spanish learning about the silver, the city had grown to 14,000. Twenty-five years later the population numbered 120,000 making it the biggest city in the Americas. Potosí became the biggest single source of silver in the world despite the fact that it was being extracted by pre-Columbian methods. Within 20 years though the surface deposits had been used up and people started going underground. The percentage of silver in the ore fell, increasing the costs of extracting it and Potosí entered the first of many crises.
The Viceroy of Lima, Francisco de Toledo, arrived in 1572 to improve mining efficiency. He introduced the use of mercury to extract the silver (and a royal monopoly on mercury supplies), set up the Casa Real de Moneda to turn all silver mined into ingots so it could be taxed (20% went direct to the Spanish Crown) and reintroduced the mita, an Inca forced collective-labour scheme.
The most expensive part of mining was the manual labour needed to build and maintain a gallery – equal to the cost of a cathedral. The source of power to grind the ore was water, but this required a system of artificial lakes and aqueducts for which there was simply not the capital to pay someone to build.
Toledo dealt with this by dividing up what was then Alto Perú, from Cuzco to Potosí, into 16 provinces from which one-seventh of the adult male population had to work in Potosí for one year at a time, three weeks on, three weeks off. This provided 13,500 men (mitayukuna) a year, between a half and two thirds of the Potosí mining force. They were paid a nominal salary which did not cover living costs and so they were supported by their communities.
The boom years
Toledo’s reforms turned Potosí into a boom city again. By 1585 there were 612 registered mines in Cerro Rico and a census in 1611 found there were 150,000 people living in the city including 6000 black slaves. John Hemming, in his Conquest of the Incas, describes how, by the turn of the 16th century, Potosí had become one of the largest cities in Christendom, rivalled only by London, Paris and Seville. He states: “By the end of the 16th century the boom city of Potosí had all the trappings of a Klondike or Las Vegas: 14 dance halls, 36 gambling houses, seven or eight hundred professional gamblers, a theatre, 120 prostitutes and dozens of baroque churches”.
Between 1570 and 1650, Potosí was the source of more than half the silver produced in the Americas. This fuelled long-term inflation and growth in Europe and paid for the import of goods from Asia. The city and its surroundings could not support such a large population itself so other areas supplied the goods they needed: wheat and maize from Cochabamba; coca from the Yungas; mules, wine and sugar from northeast Argentina; cereals from Tarija; and llamas from the northern Altiplano to transport the goods.
The silver was carried out to the coast by mule train. It took 25 days to cover the 885 km to Cobija on the Pacific coast, though Toledo also studied the geography and ordered the building of Arica, further north and a mere 750 km from Potosí. When what is now Bolivia was under the control of the Viceroy of La Plata (Buenos Aires) the silver had to be carried for 2500 km to reach the Atlantic, a 52-day walk.
Decline
Silver production peaked in 1650 and then went into a century-long decline – Mexico took over as the biggest source. By 1690 the mitayukuna were down to 2000. An outbreak of typhoid in 1719 killed an estimated 22,000 people in less than a year and by 1750 the population of Potosí was 70,000. By the 1780s it had fallen to 35,000. All Bolivian cities except La Paz stagnated or shrank during this period as a result of Potosí’s contraction.
From 1730 silver production picked up slowly, but it never reached earlier levels nor had such a great impact on the rest of the country. However, at the start of the 19th century Potosí was still a prize worth fighting for during Bolivia’s 16-year-long struggle for independence from the Spanish, Lima and Buenos Aries. Potosí suffered badly and by the time independence was won, the city was down to 8000 inhabitants and 50 working mines.
The demand for tin – a metal the Spaniards ignored – saved the city from absolute poverty in the first half of the 20th century, until the price slumped due to over-supply. Bolivia’s mines where nationalized following the 1952 Revolution and the Corporación Minera Boliviana (Comibol) continued to work Cerro Rico until the 1980s when they were privatized. With its highs and lows, mining continues in the treacherous tunnels that riddle Cerro Rico – now in the hands of miner’s cooperatives, which extract silver, tin, zinc, lead, antimony and wolfram. An increase in world metal prices has once again given Potosí a boost. Many mines reopened and reached a peak in mid-2007 with an estimated 12,000 miners working at the time. The cooperatives are now the ones to hire miners who continue to work in appalling conditions. In early 2008, two mining companies were preparing to process the tailings that have collected on the mountain over centuries.
The fabulous riches of Potosí’s past have long gone. Now only the baroque churches remain to pay homage to the many hundreds of thousands who sacrificed their lives for the greed of their colonial rulers.
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