Discover Potosí

In 1545, an indigenous herder named Diego Huallpa discovered silver while searching for lost llamas on a mountain the Inca considered sacred. What followed transformed world history. By 1600, Potosí had grown to 160,000 inhabitants—larger than London, Paris, or any city in the Americas—as Spanish colonizers extracted unimaginable wealth from Cerro Rico, the ‘Rich Mountain.’ Over 45,000 tons of silver flowed from these tunnels between 1556 and 1783, funding Spain’s global empire and flooding European markets with currency that sparked the first truly global economy. The phrase ‘vale un Potosí’ (worth a Potosí) entered the Spanish language as shorthand for incalculable riches.

The cost was catastrophic. Historians estimate between four and eight million indigenous laborers and enslaved Africans died in the mines under the brutal mita system of forced labor. Potosí became known as ‘the mountain that eats men’—a legacy that haunts the city today. Yet from this darkness emerged extraordinary culture: baroque churches with mestizo facades blending European and Andean motifs, the largest colonial mint in the Americas, and a society so wealthy that legend claims you could build a silver bridge to Spain. Today, the entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserving both its architectural splendor and its complex, troubling history in equal measure.