The mythical source of silver known as Sierra de la Plata [Silver Mountain] is somehow linked to the history of Cerro Potosí, or Cerro Rico (4,782 m). A city with the same name was founded by the Spaniards in 1545 to host the Spanish colonial mint and soon became the largest and wealthiest city of the Americas. It is the highest in the world permanently inhabited (4,090 m) and the capital of one of the richest areas in the world with gold, silver, copper, tin, bismuth, zinc, lead.
Cerro de Potosí, Pedro Cieza de Leon, La Chronica de Peru, 1553. John Carter Brown Library, 0840-010
Veduta della Città e della Montagna del Potosí, Giuseppe Maria Terreni, 1777. John Carter Brown Library, 35878-8
If we look closely at the early plates representing the area we can always see men climbing to the top and into the mountain, miners presumably. Centuries have passed since then and from this point of view not much has changed: thousands of men still walk up every morning.
People still walk into the rabbit hole in search for precious metals. These dark plates from the Eighteenth Century perfectly illustrate the kind of environment that one may find inside.
El Secreto de la mina de Potosi se descubre à Villarroel,
Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, 1728.
Mines de Potosí,
Voyage
de Marseille a Lima, et dans les autres lieux des Indes occidentales, 1720. JohnCarter Brown Library, 02437-1
What comes out are trucks of soil and rocks that are ready to be smelted, sorted and traded. But all that digging has created a sinkhole that started collapsing in 2011.
When zooming out for a moment we still see the same barren landscape that European explorers saw when they first arrived. It is traversed by roads and pipes, it is degraded and stained, but for many it is still symbolic of inexhaustible riches.
Plateau et cerro de Potosi, (Bolivia) relevés en 1835 par Mr.
Alcide d'Orbigny. John Carter Brown Library, 02-15-078
