Potosi, the 'city of silver'

Saturday morning. We've been in South America for three weeks now, and in ten days' time we'll be back in Canada. Time seems to expand when you are traveling like this since so much happens every day.

We left Camargo two days ago for Potosí, at 4000 m above sea level about 1600m higher than where we came from. Maybe that's the reason why I kept falling asleep during the bus ride, waking up from time to time to look out at more of the magnificent landscape of southern Bolivia (and yes, the roads were very good – no worries!). Higher and higher we climbed, and vegetation became ever more sparse, yet even here people somehow manage to make a living. Women herding a few shaggy sheep by the side of the road, holding one of them on a leash, still lamas, the houses ever smaller with a couple of dusty little trees, with the smallest of gardens.

The look of the rocks beside the road changed the closer we came to Potosí. Shale-like layers in many different colours glittered in the sun. 'You can see that we are nearing the 'silver city', I jokingly said to Johann. Finally, after almost four hours, the bus scaled the last peak and we could see Potosí spread out below us. It seemed almost bare of any vegetation, though we would find that it, too, has a few treed plazas. A taxi took us close to where we had marked a possible hostel on the map, and we walked the last few metres along a narrow lane to get there. The 'Anna Victoria' hostel had sounded like a nice option, but when we arrived we found the doors locked, in fact they looked as if nobody had opened them in quite some time, with a thick layer of dirt accumulated in the crack at the bottom. A passer-by told us to knock loudly, which we did repeatedly, but there was no reaction. Again it was siesta time, of course ... A woman called to us from an open window next door and told me about three more hostels just up the road – 'muy lindo', she said. 'Very nice.' Slowly we walked uphill, stopping to catch our breath after a few minutes. We would need some time to get used to the altitude again, though it shouldn't be as difficult as last year when we arrived in La Paz after flying from much lower Santa Cruz. This time we had gradually gained altitude. 

 

View down the street from our hostel

The 'La Casona' hostel, housed in a huge old building with a covered courtyard, had a big room for us. It could use some renovation, just like many of the buildings showing the former splendour of this city, but it was very adequate.

We didn't do much that first afternoon besides strolling along the narrow lanes around the core of the old city: this stop was meant to acclimatize us to the altitude and make us fit to travel in the Salar de Uyuni, about 400m lower, which, hopefully, will be the culmination of this year's trip. 

Our visit to the National Mint House, only minutes from our hostel, proved to be very interesting. Potosí's prominent feature is the cone-shaped mountain rising above it, called Cerro Potosí or Cerro Rico (rich mountain).

According to legend the famous Inca ruler Huayna Capac arrived here around 1462. Silver was discovered by chance (supposedly a llama herder making a fire at night found that the rock was melting underneath and he was looking at pure silver). But not long after the Inca started mining for the silver they heard the sound of explosions (Cerro Potosí is a volcano) and thought the gods were angry with them. The name 'Potosí' might have been derived from the word 'Potoc'si', which means great thunderous noise. Mining seized until the arrival of the Spanish almost a hundred years later, and then it began in earnest. Black slaves and local indigenous people were forced to work under appaling conditions, and up to eight million (!) are said to have perished over the two centuries the Spanish explored the vast riches of the mountain. The workers were sent down to into the mines for four months at a time – I can't even imagine what it would be like to live without daylight for such a long time, let alone work under these conditions for ten or twelve hours a day.

The National Mint House is located in the same building where, in the mid-sixteen hundreds, the silver was sent to be worked into the coins the Spanish needed to finance their opulent life style. The silver, still amalgamated with mercury needed in the smelting process, was melted, then poured in forms and removed as quickly as possible after having cooled only marginally. The slaves working in that room, using only local brush and llama dung to create a fire hot enough, were exposed not only to the smoke of these fuels but also to the mercury, of course, and didn't live long. 

The silver pieces were quickly taken to a different room. There they were squeezed to the desired thinness necessary to make coins with the help of four huge machines brought over from Europe, driven by mules in the room below. The mules, too, lived and worked under terrible conditions: keeping the heavy machinery going for ten hours a day, walking in a circle on the cobbled floor they had an average life span of four months. Horses cannot work (maybe even live?) at this high altitude, so the tougher mules were used instead.

Once the piece of silver was thin enough the coins were cut out and then stamped with the help of a kind of vice and a heavy hammer. The slaves responsible for that made 1000 coins a day. 

The technology advanced over the years. The coins became more sophisticated (and contained less and less silver: the first coins contained over 97%), Leonardo da Vinci's press was used, a steam engine replaced the mules, later yet an electric engine replaced this, and over almost two centuries the silver flowed into Spain, taking a long, difficult route to get there. From Potosí it was taken to Arica in what was then Peru by llama train, from there it was shipped to Panama, taken overland to the Caribbean coast with mules, loaded into Spanish ships, made a stop in Cuba and from there sailed to Cadiz, Spain. The last stretch of the journey was particularly vulnerable to pirate attacks. It is estimated that about 50,000 tons of silver were mined from Cerro Potosí over five centuries. Unimaginable!

A lot happened since I wrote this post three days ago. I wasn't able to post it because the internet connection went bad. 

Now, we are in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile,  after an incredible three-day trip to the Uyuni and high into the Andes. I feel I've returned from a different world. The internet connection here seems to be working well, and I'll send off the post about Potosí.