Discovery of Potosí Silver Mines
Silver was found at Cerro Rico above Potosí in what is now Bolivia in 1545, and the mountain produced something like half the world's silver for the next century. The site is at 4,000 metres in the Andes, and a city of 160,000 people grew up beneath it within sixty years — larger than London or Paris at the time, in a place with no agriculture, no fuel and almost no oxygen. The technology that made it pay was the mercury amalgamation process, introduced in the 1570s, which extracted silver from low-grade ore and required enormous quantities of mercury from Huancavelica in Peru. The labour was the mita, an Inca institution of rotational public service that the viceroy Francisco de Toledo converted into something else entirely. Sixteen thousand men a year were conscripted from communities across the southern Andes, sent for a year, and worked underground in shifts that could last a week, sleeping in the mine. Mortality was severe from silicosis, mercury poisoning, cold and collapse, and whole districts depopulated as families fled the draft. Estimates of deaths over three centuries run into the hundreds of thousands and are not reliable. The silver financed the Spanish Habsburgs' wars in Europe, drove inflation across the continent, and flowed to China through Manila, where it was the currency the Ming tax system demanded. Potosí's phrase — vale un Potosí, worth a fortune — entered Spanish. The city fell to about 8,000 people by 1825. Mining continues on a mountain honeycombed to the point of subsidence, worked by cooperatives in conditions that remain lethal. Bolivia has never been rich.
- Year: 1545 CE
- Category: Economic
