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Published: September 22nd 2012
You'd be forgiven for never having heard of Potosí. Perched at the dizzying altitude of 4,000 metres, Potosí is a bustling but modest town, a cold, windy and far-flung place on the edge of the altiplano - a very long way away from Bolivia's modern nerve centres of La Paz and Santa Cruz.
It was not always thus - very far from it. In 17th century Spain, everyone knew about Potosí. For it was Potosí which, in large part, kept the Spanish empire going for nearly three centuries. Modern Spanish still has an expression - "
valer un Potosí", to be worth a Potosí - used to describe something of great value. Potosí was once one the most important cities in South America - and perhaps beyond. What changed?
The answer is clearly visible from the bus as you approach from Sucre, a few hours' drive to the north. Potosí sits in the huge, hulking shadow of a reddish, conical hill. Its name -
Cerro Rico, the Rich Mountain - gives away its central role in the history of Potosí and the Spanish colonial empire. For Cerro Rico is one giant treasure-trove of precious minerals. Pizarro and his gang may
have plundered Inca gold, but it was the mountain looming over Potosí which held the real jackpot. Silver, lots and lots and lots of it.
The Spanish - just like their fellow British, French and Portuguese colonisers - were not the kind to get their hands dirty. It wasn't long after the discovery of the huge mineral wealth of Cerro Rico - in the mid 16th century - that they got the locals to work extracting the goodies inside the mountain. Pretty soon the Spanish had an efficient system going: locals, and later imported African slaves, working shifts in Cerro Rico's mines, extracting the precious silver ore under a forced labour regime known as
mita. The Spanish overlords no doubt lost little sleep over the degrading and inhuman conditions inside the mines, which did away with tens of thousands of lives every year; indeed, Potosí's rich mountain spewed out so much silver ore - processed and turned into bars in situ, before being turned into coins in the city's own mint and hauled by mule all the way to the sea at Lima, ready for shipment to the motherland via Mexico and Havana - that it mustn't have mattered
much to them. The silver
reales minted in Potosí - and incised with the letter P - were lifeblood to the economy of Spain.
The city, of course, benefited from its role as cash dispenser to the crown. Modern Potosí is heavily dotted with imposing churches and monasteries out of all proportion with its current size and economic significance. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the town's mint, or "Casa de la Moneda", which is Potosí's centrepiece attraction. Filling the royal mint's dozens of cavernous chambers are the original, mule-powered metal laminating machines (as well as the steam and electrically powered ones with followed in later years, before and after Bolivian independence), the furnaces where the silver was smelted and poured into ingots, the presses which turned out all those precious silver reales. It's quite a history lesson. The workers in the mint, as one might expect, were very closely watched. Nonetheless, a few managed to smuggle out scraps of silver, usually by swallowing them. "Potosí was so rich, according to my waggish guide, even people's
mierda was made of silver". Quite. It's interesting to note that the informal South American Spanish word for money -
plata - means
silver. Potosí might well have something to do with that...
When the Spanish arrived, Cerro Rico sat untouched (the city of Potosí, of course, was then only a twinkle in the conquistadores' eyes) - rather surprising given that modern-day western Bolivia was near the heart of the Inca empire. Locals like to explain this with stories of the Inca receiving warnings from above to leave the mountain alone so as not to anger
Pachamama, Mother Earth. Much more likely, although less poetic, is that the Inca knew perfectly well that the mountain was a goldmine (well, silver) but since they didn't ascribe any monetary value to the metal (its significance being religious instead), they had little interest in digging it out. Who knows? A fascinating history lesson indeed.
Not just history, though. Potosí has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
The golden (argh! silver!) days of Potosí are long gone. As the value of silver rose and fell over the centuries, so the fortunes of Potosí waxed and waned. Eventually the silver dried up. The mines, once home to slaves toiling away in the dark in their many thousands, are no longer what they were. There
are, however, miners working in Cerro Rico to this day. What makes Potosí extraordinary, though, is
how they work. No London Stock Exchange-listed profit-hungry mining giants here. The Swiss cheese that is Cerro Rico is today mined as a cooperative in conditions which the colonial Spanish themselves may well have recognised. With little regard for their personal safety and health, boys as young as fourteen entire the mountain's maze of narrow galleries, chipping away - often by hand - at the rock to get at the precious metals. Not only silver (or what's left of it): tin, lead and others besides. Men working in the mines can expect to die before the age of fifty, and often much earlier. If deadly cave-ins don't get them, diseases such as pulmonary silicosis often do. That work in such conditions can legally take place in the twenty-first century is a sobering thought indeed.
Even more sobering is a first-hand experience of those conditions. Yes, the tunnels in Cerro Rico's bowels are there to be visited - if you're brave enough. This is one visit which merits careful consideration beforehand, for several reasons. Safety is one big concern: miners can and do die
in Cerro Rico, just as they did in centuries gone by. Dynamite explosions rock the galleries regularly. The air is said to be thick with toxic dust. The other major concern is a moral one: is going to see teenagers and men risk their lives in dark and dangerous conditions on a par with visiting a zoo? In fact, is it worse? Many people admire the beauty of Potosí without going anywhere near Cerro Rico. Should I do the same?
After some thought, I decide to take the plunge, arranging to visit one of the mines with a small company run by ex-miners. In a small Spanish-speaking group, I reason, there will be better chance to meet, and hopefully speak to, some miners without the whole experience turning into some sort of voyeuristic circus.
I don't regret visiting Cerro Rico for one moment. And I would never, ever, ever do it again.
The day starts innocently enough, with a visit to a small street market in the dusty suburbs high above Potosí, in the shadow of Cerro Rico. This is where you buy a few small gifts of water and coca leaves for the miners you meet
inside the mountain - given the conditions said to reign down there, a few bottles of water and some coca leaves (the miners don't eat during the day - chewing coca helps them endure heat, cold, pain and hunger) seems rather paltry, but that is the way. And there all semblance of normality ends, as I enter a tiny shop to get a few...
extras: two sticks of dynamite, fuses and a bag of ammonium nitrate. It's not every day you pop to the market and come out with a shopping bag full of high explosives. But then, Potosí is quite clearly no ordinary place. And since we're already well beyond the bounds of normality, why not toast our visit to the mine with a little shot of the miners' favourite tipple? Fine, except when said tipple is 96%!a(MISSING)lcohol. That's 96 percent, not proof.
Cocoroco, or as the label more prosaically puts it, "
alcohol potable", is what Bolivians drink when they want to get bladdered
seriously fast. Which, if you work in Cerro Rico, is probably quite understandable (although, just imagine the carnage if you left a few bottles of the stuff lying around Cardiff on a Saturday night!). Needless
to say, I make a generous libation to Pachamama (in other words, pour the alcohol onto the ground) before knocking back what is left. Even the teaspoon I swallow nearly knocks me off my feet. My guide helpfully points out that a mixer is usually added. Oh, really?
A short ride uphill later, and we visit one of the dozens of
ingenios, or ore-processing plants, which dot the hillside of Cerro Rico. Here we are treated to an unbelievable display of home-made machinery - motors, cogs, conveyor belts, mixers and pipes, like something Caractacus Pott might dream up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - where the ore extracted from the mine is ground up and mixed with a cocktail of unpleasant chemicals (historically the extraction of silver for ore involved toxic mercury; today's processes don't seem much safer) to produce an enriched ore which is then bagged up and sold on for further processing, usually abroad. It's better not to give too much thought to the amount of appalling pollution this mineral processing must produce, especially in a country apparently so poorly equipped to deal with it.
With our coca and dynamite ready (a sequence of words one
Mining goodies for sale near the entrance to the mine
The miners are cooperative workers. All the equipment they need they have to buy themselves, with their own money.doesn't really ever expect to think, let alone write) we head further up the mountain to the mine entrance. We've previously been equipped with helmets, headlamps, overalls and boots. The atmosphere is one of quiet apprehension (and mild drunkenness from the tiny sip of industrial alcohol I've just had).
And into the depths of Cerro Rico we go. It starts easily enough, with a shortish walk along a horizontal access tunnel and nothing more than a few calls of "
cuidado con la cabeza" and some deep and murky puddles. And then comes the descent to the next level down - at which point you immediately realise just what you've let yourself in for. Within minutes we are clambering down vertical shafts shored up with nothing but a few rickety bits of wood, crawling along tunnels and squeezing ourselves, bellies flat against the ground, through bottlenecks. For anybody with the merest whiff of claustrophobia, this is the ninth circle of Hell - and then some. This is no exaggeration - with the already thin air (we're at well over four thousand metres here) filled with a fine, throat-caking dust, freaking out down here would not be very good news. As
we head deeper and deeper, we pass miners in small groups, working their concessions. A miner shovels ore into a bucket fashioned out of recycled tyres, before waggling his torch beam up the shaft as a signal to miners at the surface to start the winch. Another, armed with nothing but a hammer and chisel, bores a hole in the rock face, ready to receive its dose of explosives. Another sorts through a vast pile of broken rock, separating valuable ore-bearing fragments from the rest - if you're going to carry the ore out on your back, as many do, you definitely want to make sure it's the good stuff. By the time we get to the third level down, the atmosphere is stifling, thirty degrees and rising fast. Apprehension has by now given way to absolute disbelief. Disbelief at the camaraderie and laughter which fill these dark, oppressive, steaming tunnels. At the matter-of-factness with which the miners describe their workday and the conditions in which they toil, which to my eyes seem nothing less than medieval. And yet the miners seem proud of their work, dangerous as it is. The miners are a superstitious lot, and the mines of
Cerro Rico are dotted with shrines to a devil-like figure the miners name
Tío, or Uncle. On Fridays, at the end of the working week, they make offerings to Tío, giving him coca leaves, placing lit cigarettes in the mouth of Tío effigies and, of course, a bit of
cocoroco at his feet. No Pachamama, no Jesus in these dark and treacherous bowels of the Earth.
Several dozen metres beneath the surface we meet a pair of miners working together at the end of a gallery, a young miner chiselling away at the rock to prepare a hole for the next lot of dynamite (according to him, the six-inch hole he needs to excavate might take upwards of three hours to drill by hand) while his older workmate sits on the floor sorting the ore. The older man suggests we help him carry up a bag of ore he has just finished filling. There are no winches down here, and the ore must be brought to the surface by muscle power alone. The broken-up piece of ore are loaded into a woven plastic sac through which rough nylon ropes are threaded, making a sort of rudimentary rucksack. A rucksack
which weighs no less than 40kg. It befalls me to carry the load for the first section of the route back to the surface: within five minutes I am completely exhausted, my shoulders burning from the rope straps. Crawling through narrow passageways and climbing makeshift staircases is hard enough on your own - with 40kg of rocks strapped to your back it's not far off impossible. Some miners might complete this journey half a dozen times a day - it's simply incredible. And to me, with my relatively easy nine-to-five life, utterly sobering. By the time we get back to the surface we've been underground for nearly two hours, and the taste of fresh air - not to mention the sight of sunlight - is oh so sweet. Two hours beneath Cerro Rico have reduced me to jelly - Potosí's cooperative miners might spend six or seven hours a day here, five days a week, with the threat of death constantly hanging over their heads. How much longer will these mines stay open? Who can say...
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laetitiaaroundtheworld
Laetitia
Indeed, had never heard of Potosi before !
thanks for putting it on the map, quite an interesting mine visit you had :-) Safe travel, Laetitia