Miguel de Cervantes said in La Entretenida (1615), "I hope for a Potosí of bars and money," using the word "Potosí" as a synonym for wealth. The Royal Spanish Academy includes "Potosí" as meaning "extraordinary wealth." The expression "worth a Potosí" was born in the 16th century after the discovery of the rich silver mines of the aforementioned city located in the former Viceroyalty of Peru.
With the conquest of the Inca Empire by Francisco Pizarro (1478-1541), Spanish rule extended over the Andes, discovering the impressive mines of Potosí in 1545, the richest argentiferous deposit on the entire continent. The search for gold and silver was the factor that determined the speed of conquest (Pérez, 1985: 54-55).
The extraction of metals and precious stones during the colonial period was one of the main sources of wealth for the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, becoming one of the pillars that sustained its hegemony. Across the empire, mining work was very present and continuously developing. The mines consolidated as centers of concentration of people and different lifestyles (imposing peninsular customs). Potosí is an example of the encounter between two very distinct realities, indigenous and Spanish (Salazar y Vilches, 2014: 12-13).
Stepping on New Lands
In 1544 there was the rediscovery of one of the greatest treasures of the Spanish Empire, the discovery by the Indian Diego Hualpa of the silver vein of Cerro Rico (Figure 1), informing about it in 1545 to Captain D. Juan de Villarroel. It was in 1553 when Emperor Charles V granted him the title of Villa Imperial (Varela, 2010: 133).
Mining and Metallurgical Technology
During the first 25 years of Spanish colonization in Upper Peru, silver was found almost at the surface, so a little-developed technology of Incan origin was used. Wind furnaces called huayrachinas (Figure 2) were employed; they were made of stone, adobe, and clay; and could be portable or stationary (Campos, 2018: 25).
After 40 years of exploitation of Cerro, more complex techniques were used. Technological innovations developed alongside mining demands and needs. Among them: amalgamation (an invention by the Sevillian Bartolomé de Medina developed in New Spain, who turned it into a true industrial method on a large scale to obtain purer silver through the use of mercury (Serrano, 2004: 25)) and the construction of artificial lakes, "Ribera" and ingenios. On one hand, artificial lakes served to supply the ingenios that operated with hydraulic power. Notable are the Kari kari lake and San Sebastián lake. On the other hand, ingenios were facilities where silver was ground and mixed with mercury to obtain purer silver (Villalpando, 1978: 15-17). Regarding mercury, Spain had supplies from Almadén (Ciudad Real) in the metropolis and Huancavelica in Peru, which allowed refining low-grade silver in enormous quantities (Lang, 1999: 657).
A City of Contrasts
Urban development is closely linked to the evolution of mining activity. It is for this reason that two phases can be distinguished in the consolidation and establishment of the urban framework. The first stage developed during the early years after the rediscovery of Cerro Rico (1545-1570), a time when the mining operational chain was in the hands of the indigenous people with the technology of wayras. On one hand, the indigenous people gathered on the slope of Cerro Rico, an area called La Ranchería. The houses of the indigenous people were round, known as Chipayas (Figure 4). In contrast, the Spaniards settled in the valley (the so-called Villa de los Españoles) and, despite having an unorganized layout, it had some organization (Leggett, 2006: 40-41).
The second urban phase of the Villa Imperial is linked to the exhaustion of silver in surface veins. For this reason, Spanish colonists introduced amalgamation to increase argentiferous production. In this way, the mining operational chain passed into the hands of the Spaniards. The Viceroy Toledo in 1572 carried out the famous "Toledan reform" in the Villa de los Españoles based on a checkerboard pattern (straight streets ordered in north-south and east-west grids; and main square in an undeveloped block). The Ribera acted as a boundary between the Spanish settlement and the indigenous zone, connected only by bridges. The layout of the Villa de los Españoles and La Ranchería presented a dual urbanism (Figure 5) (Sordo, 1995: 233).
Its population growth, as well as that of the city itself, was enormous. From simple houses with a small number of inhabitants to 14,000 in the first eighteen years, then 120,000 inhabitants in the following twenty-five years and 160,000 around the year 1650. The city attracted all kinds of merchants, bringing with it a great variety of products from all over the world, such as paintings and sacred plates from Rome, Persian carpets, blacks from Cape Verde, Dutch clothing, and so on an endless list of luxury items (Varela, 2010: 134-137, 143).
Toledo
With the visit of Viceroy D. Francisco de Toledo between 1571 and 1575, Potosí experienced a series of changes in both colonial administrative structure and mining system, urban organization, among other aspects. All this was issued with the purpose of making Spanish control over the place and indigenous population more effective, as well as carrying out an improvement in the exploitation of resources offered by that land (Sordo, 1995: 232-233; Varela, 2010: 137).
Viceroy Toledo took care to "legalize" the mita (a system based on the Incan mita in which indigenous people performed forced labor for a period of time), establish rational mining exploitation, and impose an orderly functioning of the Royal Estate (Villalpando, 1978: 14). The work in the mines was carried out by those called mitayos who moved with their entire family to the city in exchange for a salary. They responded to the call of the Crown. In contrast, others left voluntarily under the condition of "mingados," which entailed higher wages and better conditions (paid upfront) (Valera, 2010: 137).
Potosí Connected to the World
Potosí's mining found an ally in the road network that acted as a backbone of the old Spanish Colonial Empire. The colonial roads were structured on the Incan road system, called Qhapag Ñam, which consisted of over 23,000 km.
The Incas made widenings, paths carved into hill sides, among other changes. These routes varied little despite the different territories they covered. However, they adapted to the distinct landscape characteristics (Choque and Muñoz, 2016: 61).
With the arrival of the Spaniards, a whole communication network was created between new territories. Silver and other precious metals traveled via the so-called Carrera de Indias, the transoceanic circuit that united the metropolis with its colonies. Seville was the only port to the Indies.
The Tierra Firme Fleet had to cross Panama's isthmus to reach the Pacific Ocean and, thus, Peru. Once there, products were loaded onto a new fleet, the Armada del Sur, bound for El Callao and Arica (Potosí port). Along the Potosí-Arica route, travelers could encounter tambos, post stations inherited from the Incan Empire and of great natural resource value. Regarding the transportation of raw materials and goods, the main protagonists were llamas (native animals to the area) and mules (exported from Europe) (González, 2014: 29-31; Serrano, 2008: 69).
Regarding the formal characteristics of these roads, construction techniques were subordinate to the singularities of the landscape's topography. For example, when the environment was characterized by a slope greater than 10º, staircase construction with steps ranging from 0’2 to 0’3 m in height (Figure 6) was used. In cases where slopes were less than 10º, ramps were commonly implemented (Orche and Amaré, 2015: 59-60).
The End of the Treasure
The decline of the Imperial Villa came hand in hand with uncontrolled silver production, miners' and azogueros' indebtedness, abusive forced labor exploitation of mitayos, an economy based on external relations of a non-renewable material, weak production, and provincial and colonial-level trade. The impoverishment of Cerro Rico and the need for more sophisticated technology, due to the difficulty of working silver because of its depletion, contributed to this situation. After experiencing several drops in production due to lack of metal supply, the Spanish Empire lost sovereignty over Potosí in 1825 with Bolivia's declaration of independence by the General Assembly of Deputies of the Provinces of Upper Peru (Villalpando, 1978: 16-17).
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