Riches from the Mouth of Hell
The dark legacy of Potosi
Thanks for reading! To support my work, please subscribe:
If you want to help keep this project going, please consider purchasing a paid subscription. Paid subscribers — it’s only about 75 cents a week! — get access to the archives, the satisfaction of supporting work they enjoy, and my undying gratitude.
Even before they realized they’d stumbled upon completely unknown (to them) continents, European explorers began to fantasize about the possibility that the New World held supernatural secrets.
They first speculated that the Garden of Eden was somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. As historian Kevin Rushby writes, Columbus died rather misinformed about what he’d found, “steadfastly believing that Cuba was part of Asia, also that he had located the Garden of Eden somewhere to the south of it, and that Christ was coming soon, thanks to his own efforts.”
A few years later, Ponce de Leon seems to have become obsessed with finding the Fountain of Youth. He and other Spanish explorers tended to believe that the magical waters of immortality flowed somewhere in Florida, while others spoke of curative waters in Bimini, somewhere near the Bahamas.
Other Spaniards settled for more worldly rewards. Conquistadors searched far and wide for El Dorado, the city of gold, a magical land where the king was so wealthy that he covered himself in resin and gold dust and then swam in a lake to rinse off his skin. Some speculated that El Dorado was only one of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Pizarro, the half-brother of Francisco, the conqueror of the Inca Empire, sacrificed thousands of lives in a vain pursuit of La Canela — a legendary valley of cinnamon.
The Spanish didn’t find any of these places, but they did manage to stumble across a place so supernaturally terrible that it seemed to be the “mouth of hell.” In 1550, Father Domingo de Santo Tomas described it:
It must have been about four years during which this land was about to be lost that there was discovered a mouth of hell, into which have entered… a great quantity of people…
On the edge of the desert in Bolivia, standing at dizzying altitudes, Father Domingo was looking up at a mountain that would shape the history of the world. The peak would come to be called, straightforwardly, Cerro Rico — “rich mountain.” Potosi, the name of the city that grew up around it — one of the highest-altitude urban areas in the world — would, for centuries, inspire fear in some and avarice in others.
This wasn’t a magical location — it was, instead, a place where man and nature combined to inflict immense suffering on some people for the enrichment of others.
First, we have to get a sense of the place.
Father Domingo described it as godforsaken:
… So that your highness may understand that it truly is a mouth of hell that, in order to swallow up souls God permitted to be discovered in this land, I will here paint something of it. It is a hill in an extremely cold wasteland, around which for six leagues in all directions not a single plant grows that can sustain beasts, nor is there firewood to cook food.
Sounds pretty bad! Today, the mountain, when covered with snow, is forbidding but beautiful.
But a picture from warmer months gives us a sense of just how desolate this landscape must have seemed in the 1500s. There’s very little there to support human habitation or to make life comfortable:
The only thing that made it worth settling in this place was silver — veins of the stuff coursed through the mountain. This is some of the metal extracted from Cerro Rico:
Before they found the mountain at Potosi, the Spanish had been tantalized by the amount of silver they encountered in South America. Items like this silver alpaca were everywhere — but where was the silver from?
Conquistadors searched far and wide for the source of the precious metal. How did they find it? The initial Spanish histories of the site tell a just-so story: in 1545, a local man (an indigenous “servant” of the Spanish) named Diego Guallpa lost his llama. When he chased it onto the mountain, he discovered the rich veins of silver there, came back, and told his Spanish bosses. the truth is probably more mundane: the area was likely already settled and its silver deposits were known to local people.
However they found out about Potosi, Spanish settlers couldn’t believe it — according to one source, there was money just lying around, chunks of silver sitting on the surface or hanging there like “potatoes:”
There was later found in it much ore on the surface of the land, and on that there registered many persons who were present and those on behalf of others who were absent…. This vein they named, and it is presently called Rica, with good reason, both for the great abundance of ore it has had as well as for being the richest there has been and for this vein running much longer than any other. They found the ore in it at a very shallow depth, because all who were present say that in many places it was found at knee depth, and in great quantity and very rich, and in places, pulling up straw, from their roots hung some 'potatoes' of the fatness of a nut or bigger of an ore called tacana, extremely rich… [it was] seeming as if that ore wanted to spill out, and it clearly signified that there lay the richness that was later seen, from which there came so much silver as is notorious.
Things moved quickly from there. After less than a year, there were 170 Spanish people and 3,000 native people living in the shadow of the mountain; two years later, the town had 14,000 inhabitants.
People flocked to this rapidly growing city — above 13,000 feet in elevation! — for only one reason: to extract the mountain’s riches. This was no easy task.
Father Domingo gives us some sense of the labor involved:
They take the ore from that mountain I mentioned with all the labor one could imagine could be taken out of them, both because it is a great task to remove the ore from so deep among so many rocks and with such danger of frequent mine collapses, as well as what happens to them from the cold and distemper of the land. The charcoal to smelt it [the ore] they bring from six leagues away [a league is about a third of a mile] and more. The firewood with which to warm themselves and to cook their food from the same distance to the fame of this hill and its richness from 200 leagues and more, from here 250, from there 230.
In 1611, Pedro Leon Portocarerro wrote that
The whole mountain is poked full of holes like a screen [criba], from all sides, and the Indians descend more than two leagues underground, each Indian with a lit tallow candle in one hand to light the way and the other hand grasping the ladder, and on his back a hide bag into which ores are loaded.
Two years later, Father Martin de Murua gave an even bleaker assessment of the miners’ work:
They have to pass through the adits that are now there, more than 2,000 [workers], and entering into them a man must go with a tallow candle in hand along the ladders made of cowhide through such different parts and places so dark and gloomy that even the most experienced [cursados] lose their bearings [el tino] and get lost, and there are some narrows such that a man on his belly can barely squeeze through. In sum, in the mine what goes on is a portrait of hell in darkness and confusion, and so it appears to all those who go about in it.
The images we have of workers in the mountain probably can’t quite capture the nature of the work:
It was dark, dangerous, and claustrophobic. People had to risk cave-ins and carry more than a hundred pounds of metal on their backs up unreliable ladders through tiny tunnels lit only by candles strapped to their foreheads. The altitude — 16,000 feet at the top of the mountain — took a toll, as did the constant transition between the heat deep underground and the frigid temperatures at the surface. The huge quantities of mercury used to refine the ore sickened and killed workers, too.
Who would sign up for such a job? Well, many of the miners didn’t have a choice in the matter. The Spanish adopted the Inca mita forced-labor system for their own purposes, forcing thousands of local people to migrate to Potosi and work there. The practice continued until 1819. Other workers were lured by the promise of being allowed to take a piece of ore home for themselves.
By 1650, there were 160,000 people living in Potosi. Some images of the city make it seem downright charming:
Some Spanish sources speak this way of the city, as well. In 1611, Portocarerro called it
The Imperial Villa of Potosí, the happiest and most blessed of all those known in the world for their riches. It has about 4,000 permanent Spanish households, and there are always 4,000 or 5,000 [Spanish] men in town. A portion of them are occupied in mining operations, and others are merchants, trafficking all throughout the kingdom with their merchandise, and others with foodstuffs, or with tallow candles of which they consume in the mines an infinite quantity every day, and others who live by their adventures and games, and in being brave.
Some portrayals of Potosi emphasized local people and customs:
But almost all of them put Cerro Rico front and center:
Only a few of them centered the actual work that gave Potosi a reason to exist, or the workers who did it, as this image does:
What was it all for? Coins like this one, minted at Potosi in 1770:
Potosi produced more than three-quarters of the world’s silver between its discovery and the end of the 1700s. The amount of precious metal coming out of that mountain was enough to briefly make Spain the richest and most powerful nation in the world, then to throw its economy into inflationary turmoil. Potosi’s silver traveled the globe — much of it eventually settled in China, as European aristocrats used Potosi silver to purchase goods from Asia.
Some of the mountain’s wealth stayed in Potosi. You can see some of it on display in this 1716 painting of an archbishop’s arrival in town:
The place became so synonymous with money that some people argue that Potosi’s mint mark (the letters PTSI on top of one another) inspired the $ symbol we now use for the dollar. You can see the mint mark at 4 o’clock and 8 o’clock on the coin below:
But the frenzy for riches at Potosi eventually came to an end. By the late 1700s, silver mining at Potosi was in decline. The easy-to-get silver was gone, tunnels kept collapsing, and Mexican mines were more efficient. Now, the mountain is mostly a tin-mining site.
I’ll leave you with three quotes that encapsulate the experience and impact of Potosi.
The city’s coat of arms, established in the 1500s, read, “I am rich Potosí, treasure of the world, king of all mountains and envy of kings.”
.jpg){kind=link}
Around the same time, Spanish King Felipe II sent a shield to the city with another slogan:
“For the powerful emperor, for the wise king, this lofty mountain of silver could conquer the world.”
But the local people — both then and now — have used a simpler saying. They call Potosi “the mountain that eats men.”
This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week’s edition, there are two ways to support my work:
You can subscribe as a free or paying member:
Or you can share the newsletter with others:
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
So interesting but so awful. The workers lives meant nothing to the Europeans. Becoming rich on the labor of indigenous people is still the name of the game. I visited Tikal in 1997 and was overwhelmed by the richness of the ruling class and culture. They also used slaves to maintain their riches. It seems mankind always reverts to slavery.
Fabulous story full of cruelty and adventure.