Potosi - the Silver City (1994) [i]
Potosi, in southern Bolivia , is the highest city in world. No one in their right mind would build a city over 13,000 feet above sea level. The air is thin and, even though the city is within the southern tropic, night time temperatures are very low. For the Spanish though there was one compelling reason - silver.
The Incas discovered silver on Cerro Rico (the "Rich Hill") above Potosi during the fifteenth century. They believed that the cone shaped volcano was a sacred mountain and that the ore should not be extracted, but should be left for future generations. The name " Potosi " is a corruption of the Quechua words for "those who come later". In 1544, after the Spanish invasion, a shepherd, who was looking for llamas which he had lost on the mountain, lit a fire to keep warm overnight and, in the morning, found slivers of silver among the embers. The Spaniards recognised the colossal wealth of the ore in the mountain and were soon mining some twenty veins of silver, each upto a metre thick. A prosperous town grew at the foot of the mountain and, by the early seventeenth century, Potosi was the second largest city in the world - only Naples had a more people.
By the early nineteenth century most of the high grade ore had been extracted and Potosi went into decline. Now it is a small city of some 100,000 inhabitants. There is little traffic and the main plaza, with its cypresses and pine trees, comes to a complete standstill on Monday mornings when a band plays hymns. A small plaque on one of the cypresses proclaims that "El libro es el meyor amigo del hombre." (Books are the best friend of man.)
The city's narrow cobbled streets slope gently uphill. Most of the houses are built of adobe bricks, sometimes with a few courses of rock at street level. Some are colour washed in pastel shades, while others retain the natural brown of the bricks. Many houses have wooden balconies, often enclosed with glass to keep out the bitter cold.
The largest colonial building is the Casa Real de la Moneda (The Royal Mint), now a museum with a particularly impressive collection of paintings - mainly of the Potosi School , painted during the eighteenth century by indigenous artists who copied Spanish religious themes.
There are a few houses with ornate stucco work, but apart from the Casa Real, the only indications of the huge fortunes which were made in Potosi are its many churches. Their most distinctive feature is the elaborate mestizo baroque stone work which is found on door surrounds and belfries. Bunches of grapes and flowers twirl their way up circular columns. The human figures which often support the columns provide a link with pre-colonial cultures, particularly at San Lorenzo where, right next to the main door of the church, there are carved women with naked breasts - for the indigenous people they represented the "pacha mama" or Earth Goddess.
Potosi is not though simply a twee tourist town. Its pretty colonial past is tempered by the harshness of current mining conditions. Cerro Rico is always visible, pock marked with spoil heaps and scarred by tracks which crisscross the mountain side. Depending on the light, the colour of the hill varies through shades of pink, red and brown, with cream, pale yellow and grey blotches.
The mines also influence the social life of Potosi 's inhabitants. Churches have been converted into cinemas and hospitals and on the Sunday when I was there, the "Gran Cervantes" cinema was boasting a double matinee bill of Bloodmatch (a kick boxing film) and ATOR - The Warrior Eagle, with a poster of a man covered in blood swinging a fearsome weapon. The noise of computer games and other amusements blare out from cafes and bars and on a Sunday afternoon visitors strolling through town are more likely to see miners lying in the street in a drunken stupor or openly urinating than they are to find a church with its doors open.
A visit to the mines gives an insight into Potosi's past and the current social and economic conditions in Bolivia . Cerro Rico is approached via dour buildings of stucco and corrugated iron. On the streets there are stalls with indigenous women selling what the miners need for a day in the mines - dynamite and coca leaves. The sticks of dynamite, wrapped in brown paper are sold with polythene bags of ammonium nitrate. There are no restrictions on the sale (even to children) of either dynamite or coca leaves and many miners chew their way through a 32 gram polythene bag of leaves every day to help cope with hunger, the altitude and the dust. They work with large wads of chewed coca leaves bulging in their cheeks which in Quechua are called "pichu" (literally, "a peak").
Bolivian mines were nationalised after the revolution of 1952, but the state mines are now in decline, with poor relations between miners and the government. Thousands of miners were made redundant when the price of tin on the international market was halved in 1986. Now much of the mining in the Potosi area is carried out by the 6,000 miners who belong to 250 cooperatives which own and operate their own small mines. The miners do not receive a fixed wage. What they earn depends on the value of the ore that they extract. When I visited, piles of stones which contained silver and zinc and which were being shovelled into lorries were worth between 40 and 60 bolivianos per ton - less than £1. The miners pay a percentage of their income to the cooperative to cover administrative expenses.
I visited El Grito del Piedra, (literally "The Scream of the Rock"), one of three mines run by the 21 de Diciembra Cooperative. Thirteen miners work in the mine which is 4,200 metres above sea level. From its entrance in the side of Cerro Rico there are views through the clear air across the stark countryside of brown, barren mountains.
Within the mine everything seems haphazard. Each miner works on his own particular vein. Occasionally there are straight regular tunnels dug during Spanish times, but generally the tunnels twist and turn, descend and climb, with no apparent rhyme nor reason. The ceiling height varies dramatically and sometimes there are almost vertical scrambles up or down a rock face to move to a different level. In places there are white arsenic crystals and black asbestos on the rock surfaces.
There is no mechanisation, no fixed lighting and no formal health or safety arrangements. Miners extract ore with pick axes or explosives. Lit by the flickering light of their naked carbide lamps, they hammer metal rods into the rock to make long narrow holes for the dynamite. They then insert sticks of dynamite and ammonium nitrate powder which is poured into twists of paper, attach a detonator and a short fuse wire, plug the hole with earth and then bang their hammer on the rock to warn miners nearby that they are about to set off an explosion. Once rocks have been dislodged, they are carried out of the mine either in sacks on the backs of miners' helpers, or in wheel barrows. It is hot and dusty work and before long most miners suffer from silicosis.
Bolivian law provides that men have to be eighteen before they can work in mines, but this regulation is not always enforced. I saw a boy aged thirteen working in the mine, helping his brother. He said that he did not now go to school and that although some children who work in mines do go to school at night, he did not do so because he was too tired. He was paid thirteen bolivianos a week - just under £2.
My guide calmly said that accidents happen every day on Cerro Rico, but that generally they are not serious. Few miners wear helmets, although they are provided for visiting tourists. There did not seem to be any prohibition on smoking underground and the miners pointed out places in the mine where they sat down to drink alcohol.
In such conditions it is hardly surprising that the miners are superstitious. In each mine there is a devil like figure with horns and a beard and moustache. He is called El Tio ("uncle"), and in El Grito he had been given the name Jorge. They reason that since there is a God in heaven, there must also be a devil beneath the earth and that the silver and zinc which they mine must belong to him. The miners propitiate him with cigarettes which they light and put in his mouth, bottles of spirits which they place nearby and coca leaves which they strew around his feet. Every year on the third Saturday in June there are miners' festivals when llamas are sacrificed and their blood sprinkled in the mine.