Although the exhilarating Spanish catchphrase vale un Potosí (roughly, ‘that’s worth a fortune’) is still alive today, the tremendous significance of Potosí in global history has faded from modern memory. The Imperial Villa of Potosí and the iconic mountain of silver that towers over it, called Sumaj Urku or ‘Beautiful Mountain’ in Quechua and in Spanish Cerro Rico or ‘Rich Hill’, were once home to one of the world’s largest cities, industrial complexes and silver mines. The city in its early 17th-century heyday boasted a cosmopolitan, multicultural population that rivalled London’s. Those who could not visit the Imperial Villa found their own Potosí in the form of a woodcut, engraving or painting.

Apparently discovered in 1545 by an Andean prospector named Diego Huallpa, the Cerro Rico, an eroded volcanic plug jutting up 4,782 m or nearly 16,000 feet above sea level, quickly captured the world’s imagination. Beneath its red and ochre surface, miners dove straight underground chasing half a dozen major and over a hundred minor vein systems, all phenomenally rich in silver. In the first decades, heavily oxidised ores were smelted in llama-dung-fired indigenous furnaces called guairas, borrowing the Quechua word for wind. Aligned up and down the ridged hills surrounding the city, several thousand guairas burned through the night thanks to katabatic breezes, the brisk downdrafts that came on at sunset (Figure 2). Invisible in the dark was the toxic blue smoke of lead flux that descended into populated valleys and ravines.

As the mines plunged deeper, enriched and friable surface ores gave way to harder, sometimes refractory ores, grey-to-black rocks containing plenty of silver but requiring more sophisticated methods of milling and refining. These ores, often containing zinc, lead and even tin, resisted smelting in the guairas, so it was only with the construction of large-scale mercury amalgamation facilities after 1572 that the silver potential of these ores was unlocked. Amalgamation required large, water-powered crushing mills, which put a premium on wood but also required the creation of an extensive system of reservoirs and canals in the neighbouring Kari guarantor mountains. Over a hundred stamp mills operated along Potosí’s main gulch by the early 1590s, when the mines reached peak production (Figure 3).

Borrowing techniques developed in Mexico’s Pachuca mining district in the 1550s, Potosí refiners had native Andean workers blend pulverised ore with salt and mercury in large open-air bins, sometimes heating the mixture to speed amalgamation. Workers and overseers experimented with other reagents in response to varying ore chemistry. Resulting blobs of amalgam were collected, washed and fired in a still-like retort to drive off liquid mercury, much of it recovered through condensation for reuse, although some escaped to foul the air and poison workers. The result was a pure silver ingot called a piña, or pinecone, several of which were smelted to make 60–80 lb bars for assay and taxation. The new mercury refining process swelled the city’s population, sped deforestation and vastly increased air and water contamination, with acid mine drainage adding to the damage (Figure 4).

The introduction of mercury amalgamation caused Potosí to boom on a scale never before seen in world history. Cerro Rico silver flowed into ships’ holds in the form of brick-sized bars (Figure 5) and, after 1574, coins, the famous pieces of eight that lubricated world trade, particularly between Europe and Asia (see ‘Piece of Eight’ in this volume). Peru’s viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–80) is rightly credited and blamed for this quasi-industrial transformation of Potosí, attested to by soaring tax returns and Spanish government spending. Production peaked in 1592, after which the Cerro Rico began to lurch along in stair-step decline, a trend reversed only in the 1730s (Figure 6).

The cost of the Cerro Rico’s bonanza had to be reckoned in blood as well as silver, since the same viceroy who introduced amalgamation also formalised and vastly expanded the Andean labour draft known as the mit’a, or ‘turn’. Maimed or sickened, many young Andean men did not go home when their turn was up, having served in the mines, the refining mills and many other tasks, including maintenance of the vast reservoir and canal system also implemented by Viceroy Toledo (see Figure 1). Many who survived the mit’a stayed on to work for wages, and many Andean women, including mine widows, stayed in town to provide rotating armies of workers with chicha (maize beer) and hot meals. Some women and even children survived by sorting ores near the mouths of the mines, paid a pittance for hard and dirty work at extreme altitudes.

A workers’ life and death camp, with indigenous townships crowded around the base of the mountain, the boomtown of Potosí was also a voracious consumer of all manner of goods, many of them arriving from the far corners of the earth. Food, drink and fuel came mostly from the near hinterland, but ready silver turned the isolated Imperial Villa into an overnight emporium of astonishing variety. Though harder to reach than Timbuktu and higher than any city in the world, Potosí quickly became a prime market for stimulants such as coca, tobacco, chicha, wine and yerba maté; spices such as pepper, cloves, cinnamon and saffron; and fine textiles including satin, damask, taffeta and velvet. Premium woollens came from England and Holland as well as Spain. The broadcloths of Segovia were especially esteemed for their high thread count. Fine linens arrived from Ireland and France as well as the Low Countries. Silks at first came from Italy, but also from Granada and (briefly) Mexico.

A wave of cheaper luxury fabrics reached Potosí from China after the opening of the Manila galleon traffic in 1571, along with Indian muslins, blue-on-white porcelain, Japanese lacquerware and religious carvings in African ivory made by Chinese craftsmen in Manila. In this proto-industrial city that ran around the clock, the mines and refineries consumed vast quantities of Basque and later Swedish iron and steel. Scribes recorded baptisms, dowries, sales and much more on high-quality Genoese paper. Professional painters, sculptors and silversmiths copied religious masterworks from Flemish engravings. Books flowed into the imperial city mostly from Iberian presses (Madrid, Seville, Lisbon, Valladolid, Barcelona), but others came from Italy, the Low Countries, Lima and Mexico City. One could purchase a variety of world maps and city plans as well as epic histories of ‘The Great Turk’ or ‘The Kingdom of China’. Portuguese, French, Italian and Flemish merchants sold Venetian glassware, along with ‘Muscovy’ saddles, Bohemian knives and German eyeglasses. The list of global imports was long, and soon after Toledo’s industrial revolution it even included fake silver thread or tinsel from Florence.

Potosí also became a major Andean slave market soon after discovery, first connected to West Africa via the long route from the Caribbean to Panama, Lima and Arica (Chile). By 1590 more enslaved Africans arrived from West Central Africa via Córdoba (Argentina), Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Enslaved African women worked in almost all the Imperial Villa’s elite households, and many sold hot foods on the streets and squares. Enslaved men mastered trades and manned workshops in addition to driving mules, overseeing mills and staffing the royal mint. African children served as pages and errand runners. The city’s town criers were nearly all Black men.

By the time silver production peaked in 1592, the Imperial Villa of Potosí was a global city with a population nearing 100,000 and growing. It was still less than 50 years old; there had been no pre-Columbian settlement on this high, alpine slope. Yet well before its post-1572 take-off, Potosí’s Cerro Rico had become a secular and sacred symbol of wealth and empire. The first iconic image appeared in the chronicle of Pedro de Cieza de León (Figure 7).

After crossing the Atlantic from Spain, Cieza made his way from what is today Colombia’s Caribbean coast all the way overland to Potosí, which he visited in 1549. The improbable city, still small and not yet graced with royal blessings, amazed him. Yet it was the Cerro Rico that really stood out for Cieza. He sketched the mountain and the town and delivered the sketch along with his manuscript to a publisher in Seville. The 1553 woodblock engraving that resulted soon circled the world, to be copied and altered to match the desires and fantasies of princes, investors and would-be discoverers (Figure 8).

Cieza de León’s spare rendering of the Cerro Rico and Imperial Villa spawned numerous imitators, some of them hewing close to his original and others exaggerating or distorting certain features. Perhaps the most astonishing image of Potosí’s Cerro Rico comes from the Ottoman manuscript known as the Tarih-i Hindi-i Garbi, a compendium of descriptions and histories of ‘the Indies’ produced in Istanbul beginning in the late 16th century (Figure 9).

Western Europeans obsessed with Spanish mineral treasure also carried on the tradition of publicising the coveted place they had never seen. The renowned Flemish engraver, publisher and anti-Hispanic propagandist Theodor de Bry never visited Potosí, or America for that matter, but he wished to render its underground world visible for his many curious readers. Based on his understanding of the work of Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, who had personally visited Potosí in the 1580s, de Bry created what may be the most reproduced image of the Cerro Rico after Cieza de León’s.

Viewers of this 1601 image (Figure 10) from the multivolume History of America may take it as a generic, stylised picture of mining, but it is clear from the details that de Bry was following Acosta’s written description. The workers climbing up and down the fixed rawhide ladder are just as Acosta describes them. The ore sack ‘backpacks’, the candles held in one hand by only some workers, even the llamas barely visible above right and below left, where there is also a water-powered ore-crushing mill, all follow Acosta’s words.

We know that a huge amount of Potosí silver had reached China by the last quarter of the 16th century, and by around 1600 the traffic showed no signs of abating. Living at the Ming court in Beijing, Jesuit Matteo Ricci made a point of informing his audience of eunuchs about the riches of America. His 1602 world map, engraved by his assistant Li Zhizao and based on a Waldseemüller print, covers an entire wall. China is in the middle, of course, and America is on the far right. Positioned more or less in the centre of South America is a small mountain range with characters that read ‘Bei Du Xi Shan’ or ‘Potosí Mountain’ (Figure 11).

Native Andean views of Potosí’s Cerro Rico also evolved as its global fame grew. The indigenous polemicist and artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala is best known for his c.1615 denunciation of Spanish misrule in the Andes.¹ The Primer nueva corónica is a lengthy indictment of corruption and greed, much of it fuelled by Potosí silver. On page after illustrated page, the writer begged King Philip III for reform. Yet Guaman Poma was also proud of the Cerro Rico, which he linked to the Incas. In an earlier image from about 1590, Guaman Poma illustrated the Cerro Rico as a symbol of two intertwined empires (Figure 12). He paints an Inca standing behind the mountain holding the symbols of the Spanish Habsburgs, Charles V’s Pillars of Hercules and the motto Plus Ultra (‘Farther Beyond’, i.e., beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to the Indies). Guaman Poma insists that the Spanish Empire relies entirely on this sacred Inca treasure by asserting that the Cerro Rico is ‘the support for your columns’. Not one to give up on powerful symbols, Guaman Poma included a modified version of this image in his 1615 ‘letter’.

Potosí’s Cerro Rico fell into decline in the 17th century, but it was still one of the world’s top silver producers. It remained the envy of the globe. A French Basque known as Accarette du Biscay visited Potosí in 1657 and described it in loving detail for Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. There was even a plan to invade via Buenos Aires, but war with Spain ended in 1659. The Dutch and English picked up on Accarette’s description and engraver Arnoldus Montanus rendered the Cerro Rico in another indelible image published in 1671 (Figure 13). The same image was republished in London in Ogilby’s America.² Here the Imperial Villa appears lush, as if located in Brazil. A thinly clad African man sporting an indigenous headdress walks barefoot behind an ox-drawn cart, a sight never seen in a rugged, high-altitude city of mules and llamas. The engraver’s misunderstanding of the use of wind furnaces and mills led him to assume that Potosí’s refiners crushed silver ore with windmills. A whole field of them populates the background. Such were the Dutch dreams of Potosí.

When English investors floated the idea of the South Sea Company in 1711, Montanus’s engraving of the Cerro Rico was repurposed for promotional posters, including Herman Moll’s popular 1712 map (Figure 14). The South Sea Company went famously bankrupt in 1720 when the bubble burst, but the dream of conquering the Cerro Rico died hard. The English would return almost a century later to try out new technologies. Meanwhile, notary books in Potosí recorded the arrival of enslaved Africans sent by the South Sea Company from what are today Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Buenos Aires.

In Potosí itself, the Cerro Rico came to be regarded as a sacred baroque symbol of empire, rendered in several paintings as the encompassing body and robes of the Virgin Mary (Figure 15). Such images reinforced the mine owners’ sense that religious piety would be rewarded with a bounty of silver. Elites set aside fortunes to build the Imperial Villa’s impressive churches, convents and monasteries, which expanded when the mines produced the least.

The second viceroy to visit Potosí was also the archbishop of nearby Charcas, Don Diego Morcillo Rubio de Auñón. Local painter Melchor Pérez Holguín memorialised the event with a huge 1716 canvas that now hangs in Madrid’s Museo de América (Figure 16). This gift to Philip V of Bourbon was matched in a more sacred vein by the archbishop-viceroy Morcillo, who commissioned a massive silver pedestal in the shape of the Cerro Rico, which he sent home to Spain. It now supports a statue of the Virgin of Charity in Villarrobledo, a small town in the province of Albacete, La Mancha (Figure 17).

With the Bourbon reforms of the 18th century, which included the halving of the severance tax from a fifth to a tenth (1736), creation of a savings bank (1747) and mit’a reform (c.1750), the Cerro Rico began a long but slow recovery. A new mint opened in 1773, outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, and advice on mining and refining was sought all over Northern Europe. Rationalisation of mining and refining entailed a new, less organic vision of the Cerro Rico, as revealed in a 1772 diagram purporting to ‘square the circles’ and get to the bottom of the mountain (Figure 18).

The Bourbon reforms paid off, although at great human cost. Production soared into the 1790s as mit’a workers laboured much harder than in the past, their ore quotas set higher and higher, and the rate of mercury consumption in the refineries fouled more water and air than at any time since the late 16th century. New technologies and more punishing work regimes could not solve all problems, however, and as the Cerro Rico’s mines grew deeper, they grew ever more expensive to work, more prone to flooding, cave-ins and simply playing out. The great Andean insurrection of the early 1780s spared the Imperial Villa of Potosí, but it severely disrupted the mit’a and ordinary supply chains.

By 1800, the city was in crisis again, facing drought on top of everything else. Mining continued in spurts, but by the time independence stirrings began in 1809, the Cerro Rico was nearly moribund. Rebels invaded from Buenos Aires in 1814, only to be driven out by royalists soon after, both groups sacking and pillaging the city, mint and rural estates. When Simón Bolívar finally reached Potosí in 1825, the city breathed a sigh of relief. The Liberator climbed to the top of the Cerro Rico to declare his work finished. South America was free.

FURTHER READING

Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, B. (1965) Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, 3 vols., edited by L. Hanke and G. Mendoza (Providence, RI: Brown University Press).

Bakewell, P.J. (1985) Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).

Bakewell, P.J. (1987) Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).

Barragán Romano, R. (2019) Potosí global: viajando con sus primeras imágenes (1550–1650) (La Paz: Plural Editores).

Bueuchler, R.M. (1981) The Mining Society of Potosí, 1776–1810 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press).

Capoche, L. (1959) Relación general de la Villa Imperial de Potosí [1585]. BAE 122. Edited by L. Hanke (Madrid: Atlas).

Cole, J. (1985) The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

González Casasnovas, I. (2000) Las dudas de la corona: la política de repartimientos para la minería de Potosí (1680–1732) (Madrid: CSIC).

Lane, K. (2019) Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press).

Mangan, J. (2005) Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Tandeter, E. (1993) Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).

¹ F. Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615).

² J. Ogilby, America (London, 1671).