Potosí and Cerro Rico

Potosí, at 4,067 metres above sea level, is one of the highest cities in the world and was during the colonial period the largest city in the Americas, driven entirely by the extraordinary silver wealth of the Cerro Rico mountain that rises immediately to the southeast of the historic centre, creating a dramatic urban landscape where the mountain dominates every view and every street orients itself toward the ore body.

The city's street grid descends from the mineral market streets near the base of the mountain down through the colonial ecclesiastical and civic buildings of the centre to the former residential zones of the indigenous mitayo labourers who worked the mine shafts, creating a spatial hierarchy that reflects the social organisation of colonial silver extraction with brutal clarity.

The Casa de la Moneda, the colonial mint, is now a museum that holds the portrait series of Spanish kings painted for the mint's accounts hall, the original monetary presses still in working condition, and extensive documentation of the mita labour system that conscripted indigenous workers from across the Andean region to labour in the mines under conditions that killed thousands annually.

Cerro Rico is visible from anywhere in the city: a steep-sided conical mountain of silver-bearing rock that has been continuously excavated since 1545, producing an estimated 60 percent of all silver mined in the world during the 16th and 17th centuries, when the mountain was literally one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the planet.

The mountain is now worked by cooperative miners who descend into shafts that are dangerously unstable, and visitors can enter certain permitted galleries to see the working conditions at first hand, a confronting experience that has made Cerro Rico a site of ethical tourism concern, where the gap between the romantic image of colonial silver and the reality of mining labour is impossible to ignore.

Colonial Potosí was a city of extraordinary cultural refinement alongside brutal extraction: the 16th-century theatre tradition developed here, and the city's musical life attracted composers and performers from across the Spanish empire, creating a courtly culture in the midst of one of history's most brutal extractive operations.

The UNESCO World Heritage inscription of the City of Potosí in 1987 recognised both the architectural legacy of the colonial period and the mountain's significance as evidence of the largest single labour mobilisation in colonial Latin American history, making the inscription one of the most complex and contested on the World Heritage List due to the ethical dimensions of preserving a site built on forced labour.

Potosí is a UNESCO World Heritage city with an unparalleled concentration of colonial civil and ecclesiastical architecture built from silver wealth.

Cerro Rico is a visible symbol of the largest labour mobilisation in colonial Latin American history, and entering the cooperative mines gives a confronting personal connection to that history.

The Casa de la Moneda museum contains one of the most important portrait collections from the Spanish colonial period alongside the original minting machinery.