Potosí

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Potosí

Potosí, a city and region that was the most famous silver-mining center of the Spanish Empire. The Villa Imperial (Imperial Town) of Potosí was the envy of Spain's rivals throughout the colonial era. It perches high (ca. 13,100 feet) in the eastern range of the Andes in southern Bolivia, inland from the altiplano. Mining dates from the discovery of silver ores in the upper reaches of the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) in 1545. The town developed rapidly, with a characteristic Spanish colonial gridiron plan, on a sloping site some two miles north of the summit of the cerro.

This site was one of the largest deposits of silver ore ever found by the Spanish in America and certainly the most concentrated rich deposit. The ore from the topmost few hundred feet of the Cerro made Potosí (with some help from district mines after 1600) the source of roughly half Spanish America's silver output up to 1650. Officially registered production to that date amounted to some 450 million ounces. Actual production was surely higher. Output boomed particularly in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, after the introduction in 1571 of a method of refining the ores with mercury (the amalgamation process). The decade from 1575 to 1585 was the most extraordinary in Potosí's history, with output quintupling. The highest-yielding year ever was 1592, when some 7.1 million ounces of silver were declared at the treasury office in the town. This immense quantity of metal was refined in eighty mills extending along the Ribera (water course) descending through Potosí. The noise of their water-driven stamps and the fumes coming from furnaces roasting ores must have made this seem an industrial city—as indeed it was, the first in colonial Spanish America.

By 1600, however, much of the easily accessible ore in the summit of the Cerro had been mined. Plenty of ore remained lower in the hill, but it was less rich and, because deeper, more expensive to extract. This high cost was the main reason for production leveling off around 1600 and then slowly declining for more than a century. During this time, various lesser deposits scattered over the highlands around Potosí were discovered; they became important for periods ranging from a few years to a few decades. The most productive of them (after Oruro, which was the center of a separate district) was probably San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo, 170 miles south-southwest of Potosí, active from about 1647 until the 1690s. San Antonio was worked to especially good effect by Antonio López De Quiroga. Although these district mines occasionally yielded as much silver as the Cerro itself, they generally flared but briefly, and their bonanzas served only to interrupt the downward trend of total production. The year of lowest output in the entire colonial period was 1712, with some 915,000 ounces registered from the Cerro and the district together. By this time Potosí was being overtaken in production by northern Mexican mines such as Zacatecas (1546) and Guanajuato (1550), which dominated Spanish-American silver output for the rest of the colonial period.

After some thirty years of flat output, the Potosí district staged a recovery from 1750 to 1800, though barely reaching half the production levels of two centuries earlier. The reasons for the recovery include higher demand for silver early in the eighteenth century, a reduction of the royalty tax in 1736 from a fifth to a tenth of gross production, great pressure on draft laborers to raise their productivity after about 1750, and possibly the expanding use of blasting to reach and remove ore.

Potosí suffered greatly, as did all silver-mining centers in Spanish America, during the Wars of Independence. Refining plants were destroyed, maintenance of mines was neglected, and, after the wars, capital for restoration of productive capacity was scarce and dear. The Cerro itself, however, still yielded about half Bolivia's silver in 1846. And in the last quarter of the century Potosí mining again saw substantial recovery, though it was largely the doing of district mines, such as Huanchaca, 75 miles southwest of the town, which in 1895 yielded just over 1 million ounces. Bolivian silver mining had benefited in general from the availability of cheaper mercury once large amounts began to be produced in California in 1850. This price cut for the prime raw material needed for amalgamation encouraged investment in silver mining by Bolivians for the first time since Independence. Foreign engineers were also brought in to advise on technical renovation. The outcome, at Huanchaca, was enlarged orecrushing capacity, especially once steam-driven mills were installed in 1878, and improved methods of amalgamation. Potosí also benefited from the advice of foreign experts.

In the late 1890s a drop in the world price of silver severely depressed Bolivian silver mining. But at the same time world demand for tin was rising fast, a need that Bolivia, and particularly Potosí, was well endowed to meet. The department of Potosí proved to hold large and rich tin deposits, among the most famous of which was Uncía, 100 miles northwest of Potosí. Mining was developed there by Simón Iturri Patiño, the most famous of the Bolivian "tin barons," from 1897. Potosí shared in the tin boom, partly through extraction of tin ores from the Cerro Rico and partly through reprocessing of tailings (wastes) from silver refining, which proved rich in tin. Many tailings in Potosí have in fact been processed several times. Since the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, which nationalized the major tin companies, the large mines in the Cerro have been worked by the state mining company, Comibol (Mining Corporation of Bolivia), mainly for tin, though with some subsidiary product of silver. Enormous amounts of silver ore still remain in the Cerro, but they could be exploited profitably only by open-cast mining.

The great silver industry of colonial Potosí required many workers. From the late sixteen century on, about a half of these were wage laborers—Indians who found permanent employment in mines and refineries at a relatively high wage more desirable than other possible livelihoods. The other half, though, were native draftees, forced to work in mining and refining by the demands of the notorious Mita ("time" or "turn" in Quechua) set up in the 1570s by Don Francisco de Toledo, fifth viceroy of Peru. According to this system, some 13,400 adult male Indians came to Potosí each year from a highland catchment area reaching almost as far north as Cuzco. Each of them performed forced work in silver production for four of his twelve months' presence in Potosí. Many of these mitayos brought wives and children with them. These families often stayed on after the year was up, both men and women finding work in Potosí in a variety of possible jobs preferable to the long journey home. In this way, and because Potosí from the start offered much employment for Indians wanting to earn money for their tribute payments (among other things), the town's population grew fast. By 1600, it was very probably over 100,000. In the space of about fifty years, Potosí had become one of the world's most populous cities.

Most of this population was Indian, living in rancherías (native quarters) encircling the Spanish town center, with a particular concentration on the south side of the town beneath the Cerro. The sixteenth-century street plan of the center has changed little to the present. A rectangular pattern of streets, oriented north-south and east-west, extended out from the main plaza for three or four blocks in each direction. Mine and refinery owners, merchants, officials of the treasury and mint, town councillors, and priests lived here. Facing onto the central square were the main parish church of Potosí, the town hall, the mint, and the royal treasury offices.

Potosí had an estimated population of 768,203 as of 2005. Contrary to reports of its being a "ghost town," it is in fact an active administrative, marketing, and mining center. It is the capital of the department of Potosí, an area quite similar to the colonial mining district of which the Villa Imperial was the center. The department consists of parts of the western and eastern ranges of the Andes, with peaks approaching 20,000 feet, and the southern altiplano between them, at about 12,000 feet. It forms the southwestern corner of Bolivia, bordering on Argentina to the south and on Chile to the west. Apart from tin and silver, the department contains ores of bismuth, lead, copper, zinc, antimony, tungsten, and wolfram, some of which are worked.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edmond Temple, Travels in Various Parts of Peru, Including a Year's Residence in Potosí (1830; repr. 1833, 1971). Philadelphia: E.E. Carey & A. Hart.

Lewis Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956.

Cornelius H. Zondag, The Bolivian Economy, 1952–1965; the Revolution and its Aftermath. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Salomón Rivas and Raúl Carrasco, Geología y yacimientos minerales de la región de Potosí (1968).

Orlando Capriles Villazón, Historia de la minería boliviana La Paz: Banco Minero de Bolivia, 1977. Rose Marie Buechler, The Mining Society of Potosí, 1776–1810. Ann Arbor, MI: Published for Dept. of Geography, Syracuse University, by University Microfilms International, 1981.

Antonio Mitre, Los patricarcas de la plata: Estructura socioeconómica de la minería boliviana en el siglo XIX (1981).

Enrique Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour in Late Colonial Potosí," in Past and Present 93 (1981): 98-136.

Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Cumpulsory Indian Labor in the Andes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.

Gastón Arduz Eguía, Ensayos sobre la historia de la minería altoperuana. Madrid: Editorial Paraninfo, 1985.

Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.