Potosi, The Silver City

Another belated post
6/14/11 9pm
Started off this morning with my usual disoriented wandering that I do in a new town, trying to figure out what direction is what. I wanted to go for breakfast at a vegetarian place that’s supposed to have really good food – I finally found it, but it was closed. So my wandering continued and I eventually ended up getting a basic breakfast at a café, but couldn’t eat my scrambled eggs because they were filled with ham, which they don’t usually do here. Tried to find one agency that was supposed to be very eco-friendly in their mine tours, but it wasn’t where my book said it was (though several hours too late, I passed by it on another street), so I booked with another agency for an afternoon tour.
I spent the morning at Casa de Moneda, an old national mint and the famous museum of Potosi. Took an English tour, though should have taken the advice of my book and just gone with a Spanish tour because although the guide spoke English well, she didn’t say much at all and the Spanish tour seemed much more comprehensive. A tour is mandatory for seeing the museum, which meant that we were rushed from room to room and I didn’t get to stay as long as I would have liked at some of the exhibits, but still saw some really cool things. The first couple rooms were religious art, the only one of which interested me was a painting of the story about Potosi. It featured Cerro Rico, one of the big mountains full of mines, and was filled with all of the different important figures, from Holy Trinity to the sun, moon, and earth to the religious and political figures of the area throughout history. There was an image in the mountain of a farmer with his llamas who as the legend goes, camped on the mountain one night and lit a fire that resulted in small explosions which occurred because the mountain was rich in silver and minerals. He described the explosions with the sound ‘poto poto’ and combined with a Quechua phrase, the name of the city of Potosi came about.
My favorite part of the museum were the exhibits on the mint. The mint is the biggest colonial building in Potosi with five courtyards and over a hundred rooms, many of which remain the same as they did several hundred years ago with their slick but uneven stone floors and brick walls. Throughout the 1800s and halfway through the 20th century, silver coins were made at the mint. Ironically since 1951, no money at all is made in Bolivia – it is more cost effective to make the coins in Chile and Canada and the paper money in France. But way back when, they started out by purifying the silver in furnaces heated to over 900 degrees – slaves were given this job due to the difficulty and hazards. The hot silver was poured into molds to make 15 mm thick sheets of metal. The metal was then pressed through twelve times through a pretty intricate apparatus until it was 1 mm thick. Mules walked in circles for hours on end, spinning a wheel above them, which in turn spun another large wheel and another, creating enough force to flatten the metal piece that a worker placed through. The mules were downstairs, four to a circle, and the giant machines were on the floor above. There were three of the four-sided machines, all sent over from Spain and made of metal and strong oak, which still is well maintained today in the chilly dry climate of Potosi. After being pressed, the sheets of silver were cut into circles and two dies (negatives) were used to engrave both sides of the coin – it was a very labor intensive process with the force supplied by people slamming heavy hammers onto that surrounded the silver pieces. Prior to getting the fancy machinery from Spain, coins were all made entirely by hand and thus were not standardized at all. People would shave off and keep the edges of the coins for the silver, and thus the coins got smaller and smaller with time until the new system was put in place. Later, they moved away from mule power to using steam-powered machinery, which they got from Pennsylvania, and later on, to electric machinery from New Jersey. The Bolivian currency changed four times over the last two centuries due to the changing value of silver and moving from being a colony of Spain to its own Republic. It started out as Suenos, then became Bolivianos, then pesos until the 80s (though many people still refer to costs in pesos), and then back to Bolivianos, though in different sized coins and bills than before. There was a room full of cases of all these coins with the different engravings used over time based on the political status of Bolivia.
There was also a room with over 3000 different minerals, most from Bolivia but some from around the world. It was freezing inside so none of us could bear to stay for long, but there were tons of really gorgeous and interesting minerals throughout. We passed through another room with items made of silver, from spoons to religious décor to plates, bowls, and huge intricate jars and vases. There was a gallery of archaeology filled with bones and skulls, part of the skeletons of a whale and an armadillo (don’t know how those fit in with anything), mummies, and ceramics. And quite a bit more too, it was lots to take in.
After I walked out of the freezing museum and into the sunlight, it was time to hunt for a new camera. Eventually found a store selling a few and settled on a Fuji (the only option was in pink!). It’s a pretty good camera but I was really not planning on spending this much money or having to buy a new camera while I was here. But no way am I going the next month and a half without a camera with so much still to see!
After lots of scurrying around town to get the battery charged and go get my memory card from my broken camera, I headed over to the Real Deal for the mine tour. At first, it was just me, Jake from Norway, and Maytal from Israel. We were driven over to the warehouse and got decked out in miners gear with rubber boots, pants and a jacket to put over our clothes, and a helmet with a light that was connected to a waist belt. We looked quite ridiculous as we walked through the miners market and bought some gifts to bring to the miners (coca leaves, water, and juice). We then had to hang around for a while and wait because four others were coming to join the group. Once they eventually arrived (a couple from Poland and another from Brazil), we piled back into the van and drove partway up Cerro Rico to the Rosario cooperative mines. We were at 4300 meters, but luckily the altitude didn’t get to me too badly.
From what I had read and heard, I expected the mines to be an eye-opening but horrendous experience, definitely worth doing once but never repeating. They were actually much less strenuous and intense than I had expected. As we walked and ducked through the tunnels and climbed a bit, there were definitely some hot and cold points as well as some overwhelming smells and tons of dust in the air, but I had imagined much worse. Though we spent under two hours in the mines and miners typically spend six to twenty hours there at one time, so that definitely puts it in a different perspective. They eat before they go in and after they go out, but besides that, their only sustenance is the coca leaves that they constantly hold in a wad in their cheeks. They seem to sometimes bring in a bottle of water, but that’s not nearly enough for a day’s work given the dust that surrounds them as they do their strenuous work. Oh, and they also drink straight from delicious smelling bottles of 96% alcohol, always spilling a few drops on the ground as an offering to the Pachamama before they take a drink. Tour groups come through frequently and it’s become very customary to bring gifts for the miners, which they both expect and appreciate. We talked for a while with several groups of miners, who were all very friendly and cracking jokes as they took pictures with us and answered questions about life in the mines. Our guide Reynaldo was awesome and told us a lot about the way that the mines work. His English was really good (I definitely felt very much a tourist today doing so much in English rather than Spanish) and he explained things well, though there were a few points where we had a hard time getting the answer to a question we had.
As we walked through the mines, we followed along the rail path that was used to wheel around wagons and bags of mineral chunks. At many points, we had to crouch down to avoid hitting our heads on the low ceiling or swerve around and duck under the pipes that held compressed air to work the machinery. The path was sometimes dry and sometimes a muddy river that we sloshed on through, very grateful for our boots. Some of us had bought surgical masks to cover our noses and mouths and we alternated using them to hide from the dust and chemical smell and not using them to be able to breathe more easily as we walked quickly along. (Bolivians seem to like to walk very, very quickly on tours even when asked to slow down - but on the sidewalks, they stroll along very, very slowly and casually in large groups so that I often just walk a bit in the street to pass them because I’m not used to walking at that pace to get somewhere.) We didn’t see the drillers, which seems to be the most intense and hazardous job in the mines, but we passed by several groups wheeling out their wagons or taking a rest. There was one open space where a group of men worked shoveling their mineral chunks into rubber buckets which they then attached to ropes and pulled to another level using machinery. This was the one place in the mines where a light bulb hung from a corner, but everywhere else, navigation was done entirely with headlamps. Several of the guys in my group shoveled for a bit and with all the swirling dust, strong smell of chemicals, lack of fresh air or sunlight, and heavy labor, it looked like quite the intense job, hard to imagine the miners doing all day, every day. Definitely needed our masks at that point, but the workers wear no face protection and were hacking away – by the end of their careers, they usually have black lungs and are coughing up blood. At one point during our tour, we left the open tunnel and climbed a windy passage and then down a ladder with the support of a rope. From this area, we pointed our lights to see further down still where another long rope led deeper into the mountain where we could hear drillers working, as well as another ladder up to a different drilling site.

The mine we were at was a cooperative mine where there are many different groups of miners who have their own equipment and their own areas and types of work. They set their own hours and divide their earnings amongst themselves. It seems like a pretty complicated system with paying taxes to the government in order to get a pension later and there being miners of many different levels, none of us fully understood what Reynaldo told us about it. But it’s a socialist system and some of the miners are able to make huge amounts of money if they have a good find, whereas others work ridiculously long hours and don’t make much at all. It all depends on the quality and quantity of the minerals they find. Most of the silver has been depleted from the mountain, but there is still some buried within, as well as many different minerals. The miners each have different roles, from shoveling to pushing wagons to setting dynamic to drilling – the drillers are by far the worst off and get too sick to work after about ten years of drilling. The pension system is pretty complicated and they have to work for quite a while to get any sort of benefit; Reynaldo just kept going on tangents when we tried to get him to clarify that for us.
After the miners take all of their findings out of the mines, they sell them to the processing plant based on the quality and type of metal – three samples are taken for testing to confirm how much the miners get paid. The processing plant was a dusty loud whirl of machines and chemicals. First was the room where various chemicals were mixed with wooden wheels and slowly dripped down into white pipes that went to the floor below. Downstairs the stones were ground up, mixed with chemicals, and the garbage material was sifted out based on weight through a series of rustic apparatuses. The final product was laid out to dry, but it was still not pure metal. They don’t have the capability to separate out the pure products efficiently in Bolivia, so the processed dry material is sent to Chile and then sent by boat to Europe (it can’t be sent directly since Bolivia is landlocked). Quite the bad situation for Bolivia because they have to then buy silver from Europe at a much higher price!
Each mine has several figures of Tio ----, the owner of the stones and minerals within the earth. The workers give offerings of drinks, coca leaves, and decorations to this figure with horns in exchange for protection while working underground. The miners rely on both this figure and the Pachamama to look after them. Four times a year (the first three Saturdays in June and one in August – I purposefully avoided being here on a Saturday), there is a huge ceremony where white llamas are sacrificed for the workers’ protection. They give offerings of llama blood to their protectors in order to feed them the nourishment they need and spill animal blood so that less human blood will need to be shed. The llamas are very expensive, but a certain number of them need to be sacrificed based on the number of workers at the mines. This was just done a few days ago, so the walls on the outside of the mines and the blue doors outside the washrooms are all streaked with fresh llama blood that was tossed and spilled in offering during last weekend’s festivities.
After leaving the mine and processing plant, we bundled back into the car, freezing cold with the night air of Potosi, though it was nothing compared to what I will experience in Uyuni. Dinner was included in our tour, so we went to The Meal Deal, a restaurant run by the wives of the ex-miners who own The Real Deal. The kids of the families were hanging around the restaurant and one of the mothers carried her large three year old daughter in a blanket bundle on her back until she fell asleep, quite a task given that she was standing up straight and working this entire time. The two couples went elsewhere for dinner for some reason, but I ate with Jake and Maytal, though Jake left early to go catch a night bus to Uyuni. We had crepes with cheese, quinoa soup, fried eggplant with French fries and veggies, and hot chocolate. Very good, but always disappointing when they are out of something on the menu that you’ve been waiting for through the whole meal – flan! Made my way back to the hostel without getting lost and bundled up in my thankfully very warm blankets in the freezing cold room. Next stop, Uyuni.