Travel to Potosí

In 1545, an indigenous prospector named Diego Huallpa found silver on a mountain the Inca held sacred, according to legend while chasing stray llamas across its slopes. What followed transformed world history. Within decades Potosí had grown to perhaps 160,000 inhabitants, rivaling London and Paris and surpassing any city in the Americas, as Spanish colonizers drew unimaginable wealth from Cerro Rico, the Rich Mountain. More than 45,000 tons of silver flowed from these tunnels between 1556 and 1783, funding Spain’s global empire and flooding European markets with the currency that sparked the first truly global economy. The phrase vale un Potosí, worth a Potosí, entered Spanish as shorthand for incalculable riches.

The cost was catastrophic. An unknown but vast number of indigenous mitayos and enslaved Africans died in the mines under the brutal mita system of forced labor; the figure of up to eight million often repeated by guides is a contested estimate most historians regard as inflated, yet the true toll was immense. Potosí became known as the mountain that eats men, a legacy that still haunts the city. Even so, from this darkness came extraordinary culture: baroque churches with mestizo facades blending European and Andean motifs, the largest colonial mint in the Americas, and a society so rich that legend claimed one could build a silver bridge to Spain. Today the historic city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserving its architectural splendor and its troubling history in equal measure.

Cerro Rico remains an active mine, now worked by cooperative miners drawing tin, zinc, and lead from tunnels that honeycomb the mountain. Tours offer an unflinching encounter with conditions that have changed little in centuries: narrow passages, choking dust, one-ton ore carts thundering down the rails, and the ever-present offerings to El Tío. This devil-like figure is said to rule the underworld, and miners believe their safety depends on keeping him satisfied with coca leaves, cigarettes, and 96-percent alcohol. Effigies of El Tío sit at mine entrances throughout the mountain, each surrounded by the remnants of bargains struck between men and a mountain that has claimed countless lives.

The experience is intense, physically demanding at altitude and emotionally confronting in its glimpse of ongoing hardship. Many miners are said to live only into their forties, often falling to silicosis from years of breathing rock dust. Yet there is also camaraderie, dark humor, and pride in carrying on traditions that reach back generations. Visiting takes both physical preparation and emotional readiness, but for those willing to engage honestly with this difficult history, the mines offer a view of human resilience found in few other places. Potosí is one of the very few places on Earth where visitors can openly buy dynamite, sold over the counter at the miners’ market as a customary gift for the workers.

While the mines defined Potosí’s wealth, the city above ground shows how that wealth was spent. The Casa de la Moneda, the Royal Mint, occupies an entire city block behind meter-thick walls; the current building went up between 1759 and 1773, replacing a first mint from the 1570s, to house the machinery that turned silver into Spanish coin. When the king saw the construction bill, legend says he exclaimed that the building must be made of silver. Today the museum preserves the massive wooden cog machines once turned by mules, galleries of colonial painting including works by the mestizo master Melchor Pérez de Holguín, and the enigmatic mascarón, a grinning face hung in the courtyard in the 1850s or 1860s for reasons no one has satisfactorily explained.

Beyond the mint, Potosí’s religious architecture rivals any in South America. The Church of San Lorenzo de Carangas carries one of Bolivia’s most photographed facades, an elaborate eighteenth-century mestizo baroque portal where indigenous artisans carved mermaids, celestial symbols, and local flora alongside Christian imagery. The Santa Teresa convent, founded in 1685, offers guided tours through chambers where cloistered Carmelite nuns lived in near-total isolation until the church reforms of the 1960s, their cells and devotional objects giving an unsettling sense of colonial religious life. Throughout the historic center, more than 2,000 colonial buildings preserve the legacy of what was once the richest and most populous city in the Americas.