Curated Silver

Potosí: the mountain that ate men

In 1545, high on the Bolivian altiplano, a Quechua man named Diego Huallpa spent a cold night on the slopes of a reddish peak. The versions differ on why he was there. Some say he was chasing a stray llama; others that he was looking for an Inca shrine. The best-loved telling says he lit a fire to keep warm, and by morning thin threads of molten silver were trickling out of the ground beneath the embers.

Whatever the truth, the Spanish heard about it fast. The peak became Cerro Rico, the "Rich Mountain", and it proved to be the greatest single source of silver the world has ever known. In the second half of the 16th century it produced an estimated 60% of all the silver mined on Earth.

A city erupted at its foot almost overnight. Potosí, founded in April 1545 at over 4,000 metres, grew within decades into one of the largest cities in the world, by some estimates home to 200,000 people. It had churches, theatres, gambling houses and a royal mint. The silver was struck into coins, the famous "pieces of eight", and shipped to Spain. From there it flowed on to Genoa and Antwerp, and across the Pacific via Manila to China, which wanted silver above all else. For a time, Potosí's mountain was the hidden engine of the first truly global economy. Spaniards coined a phrase that survives today: vale un Potosí, "it's worth a Potosí", meaning something of almost unimaginable value.

The cost was paid underground. Under the colonial mita system, Indigenous communities were forced to send men to work the shafts in shifts lasting days. Enslaved Africans were brought in too, roughly 30,000 over the colonial era. Miners breathed silica dust, and the refiners handled mercury, used from the 1570s to pull silver from poorer ore. So many died that Cerro Rico earned a second name: the mountain that eats men. A grim local saying claims you could build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid with its ore, and a second bridge beside it from the bones of those who dug it.

The high-grade silver ran out long ago, and tin replaced it as the main prize. Yet the mountain is still mined today, honeycombed with so many tunnels that engineers worry the summit could collapse. Potosí itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its colonial streets a monument to one fireside discovery that rearranged the wealth of the world.

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