You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Potosi' tag.
Potosi’s big drawcard, which has elevated it out of the forgotten murk of history and placed it among the main tourist sites of Bolivia, is its still-operating mines in Cerro Rico. Few people stay more than a couple if nights in Potosi, but that is long enough to descend into the mines, and to encounter a life and a world utterly different to anything any gringo will ever know.
Silver was officially discovered in Cerro Rico in the year 1545 (though the Incas seem to have suspected there was a whole lot of it buried in the mountain before this), and the exploitation of it has been ongoing ever since. It is thought that some 45,000 tonnes of silver have been extracted from the mountain. Throughout the colonial period the mines were worked by conscripted labour from the surrounded villages. When this proved insufficient, the drafting of African slaves was approved. Needless to say, little of the wealth of the mountain remained in the hands of those who were responsible for mining it. It is thought that as many as 8 million people died as a result of working the mines during this period.
In the centuries since silver first started to flow out of the mountain, the only significant technological advances have been the introduction of battery-powered headlamps and dynamite. Otherwise conditions in the mines have continued virtually unchanged. Now the miners work for themselves, in loose collectives based on extended families. They determine their own hours but still need to work long shifts for six days a week in order to make much profit. The veins of pure silver that once ran through the stone are all depleted; now it is crude ore with a content of around 15% valuable minerals that they dredge forth. This ore is sold to refineries at the rate of about 200Bs ($30US) per tonne. Even at these paltry rates, miners can expect to make twice as much as the minimum wage earned in other industries in Bolivia. No lesser incentive, I am sure, would see the mines still operating.
In preparation for our descent into the mines, our burgeoning tour group was kitted out in high mining fashion; rubber boots, helmets, headlamps and uniform pants and jackets. Wearing these we were taken to by gifts of dynamite, soda and coca for the miners unlucky enough to be working on this Saturday (the lucky ones with the day off were already littered comatose in the streets).
Thereafter a quick trip to see the refining process in action. It’s hard to understand why only dangerous materials can be used in this process, but here was cyanide and mercury separating waste from silver, tin and lead. The process is very water-intensive, a problem in a city as high and dry as this. Some of the water is recycled, the rest of it flows back out and into the rivers, bearing with it most of the cyanide.
Our guide had started working in the mines with his father and brothers when he was 13. Now he is one of the lucky ones who has learned a few languages, can lead tours, and hopes never to see any of his family ever having to return to the mines. Different numbers are given for the average life expectancy of miners, but there is no doubt that the harsh conditions take their toll, and that few reach retirement age (this is one reason why the tour company, unlike Lonely Planet and other resources, insists that tourists not give the miners cigarettes as gifts).
I could feel the difficulty of life in the mines within a few labyrinthine twists of the first tunnel. The ceiling was low enough to leave my thighs burnings for days afterwards, as I stooped and ducked along after the flickering light of our guide. The miners are of course all much shorter than I am, but in the lower galleries everyone, giant gringo or diminutive miner, is forced to crawl on hands and knees to reach the spots where the most work is being done. Invisible barriers of heat and cold lurk in the dark, drawing forth torrents of sweat and then sending shivers through the body. A litany of toxic dusts and gases (I’ll mention acetylene vapour, arsenic gas and asbestos and not move on to ‘B’) are present in the mines, but altitude and common rock dust are enough to bring gasps and chokes to the throat.
In the mines we encountered El Tío, a statue of the devil, complete with pitchfork and wilted cigar. The pre-Colombian Andean cultures were polytheistic rather than dualistic, and so the devil, as appropriated into this world, is not a figure of absolute evil, but one of many entities-within-the-world to be revered and placated. El Tío, as lord of the underworld, is the deity onto whose turf the miners are transgressing, so they remember him with offerings of booze, smokes and coca, and hope he will visit a lucky strike upon them, rather than cave-ins or silicosis.
There weren’t many people working while we were in the mine. Still, we met men knocking holes for dynamite into the hard stone. This takes about three hours with hammer and chisel. We also passed men pushing and pulling heavy trolleys full of ore along the main tunnels, and the men who then shovelled the ore into buckets that were manually hoisted to the surface. The strain of the work was awesome, the loads being carried and the scale of their productivity enormous.
We were in the mines for less than two hours; long enough to get covered in dust and sulphur-heavy mud; long enough to be left with burning lungs and legs; just long enough to catch a glimpse of the impossibly difficult life that the Cerro Rico had always offered to miners; not nearly long enough to fully comprehend the conditions faced here, the daily repetition and burn. How lucky I am to live a life so different to this one quickly passed under Cerro Rico.
The bus trip from Sucre to Potosi is one of the few in Bolivia that can be completed in an afternoon. The road is almost completely paved and has few of the precipitous drops that characterise Bolivian intercity connections. Why then had it taken me so long to visit this, the city in Bolivia I was most eager to see?
As the bus trundled and grumbled through the countryside the mountains got taller and the cliff faces sharper. The green and golden valleys of Sucre were replaced with the stone of the Potosi heights. Isolated shepherds and families sat by the roadside, surrounded by the immensity of the Andes. Dogs sat dispersed along the roadside, and their presence there was something of a mystery.
Potosi sits at just over 4000 metres above sea level. At this height not much can grow or flourish. The air is cold but the sun is fierce, and water is in short supply. And yet in the 17thcentury Potosi was the largest city in the Americas and one of the largest in the world (behind only London, Sevilla, Paris and Madrid). The stellar ascent of the city is entirely due to the enormous amounts of silver that were found and extracted from the nearby mountain ‘Cerro Rico’.
Arriving in Potosi it is easy to see why Cerro Rico was revered by the pre-Colombian indigenous peoples, and thus why they never mined it themselves. The perfectly triangular mountain reaches about 4800 metres, towering over the surrounding area. Today its slopes are denuded and wrapped around with roads, and punctuated by mine entrances, but even so it is a stunning sight, all red earth hues against the clear skies.
Once silver had been discovered and was being exploited (as were the thousands of indigenous and African slaves pressed into service in the mines), the wealth of Cerro Rico and Potosi spread around the world. The ‘treasure fleets’ of silver from Potosi kept the Spanish monarchy solvent for over a century. The crown was entitled to only one fifth of the gleanings of the New World, though, so that there was still vast, vast private wealth to be made in Potosi in the 17th and 18th century (especially considering that the illegal extraction and trade of silver is supposed to have been so enormous that a bank was established specifically to control the illegal silver trade).
Much of the colonial splendour of Potosi is still apparent. The enormous mint built in Potosi, which flooded the world with Potosi coins, is a magnificent building occupying a whole block. Close by it towers the cathedral, one of the more than 80 churches built with Potosi silver. At its height Potosi had its own school of art, and its influence can be seen everywhere, in the blending of the high art of Europe with traditional American forms and styles. Uncoiling out from the central plaza and the cathedral is the demented grid of Potosi’s colonial streets; narrow, twisting alleys that spill out into plazas and churchyards before winding on, a patchwork of faded colours and chipped facades. Given how much wealth Potosi produced, little of it is in evidence in the private houses of colonial Potosi. Those that made their fortunes tended to move on to more hospitable climates and lands like Sucre or (comparatively speaking) La Paz, or to more distant cities in the Americas and Europe. Still, traces of the former wealth of the city can be seen in the grand balconies and porticos that look down on the streets.
By the 19thcentury Potosi was in a steep decline. The purest veins of the Cerro Rico had all been bled dry, and as the promise of wealth dispersed so did the opportunistic population of the city (as did the reluctant labourer population). As silver was replaced by paper currency its value plummeted, and Potosi became a tin mining town, with none of its former lustre.
Today the ore still hacked from the mountain contains trace amounts of silver, lead and tin, and it takes far more work and strain to turn a profit from the mines. Although these metals are still hugely important, most of their refining and exploiting is done overseas, where there is better technology. Only the first stages – mining and basic processing – are done in Potosi. This is enough to keep the city alive, but its population today is half of what it once was. Its former elegance is fading, and although it is still unequivocally a mining town that does not mean what it once did. The outer barrios of the city are a mix of little brick houses and garbage dumps. The mint that once produced one of the world’s first international currencies is now a museum, and Bolivia’s currency is minted in other countries.
There is still a faint trace of the former mingling of the rich and poor, but today the wealthy are tourists, who come to see the mines and the colonial streets. For a city as forgotten as Potosi there is a wealth of gringo facilities in the city. Expensive cafes and bars, earnest clubs and some of Bolivia’s best hostels now fill the facades of the inner city. When the mines eventually run dry Potosi will need to find a new future, a new definition for itself. Tourism could be one way forward, but the city will never again be what it once was.
