Getting Lost in Bolivia’s Wine Lands, Storied Mines, and Haunting Salt Flats

I began to lose track. We had been traveling for several days, and now we were becalmed in this sylvan paradise, behind a high garden wall, among fragrant lavender bushes and the sound of birdsong. The glasses of wine kept arriving and I felt I never wanted to leave. The afternoon light filtered down through the yellow-flowering jacaranda trees. We tried the singani, treating it with due respect. This was followed by an exquisite cognac-style drink. We rounded off our tasting with an astonishing pomegranate liqueur. I was lifted from my seat reluctantly as the guide helped me into the car.

In Potosí we stepped from passion to greed. Dating from 1545, Potosí owes its existence to a single and singular pyramid-shaped mountain that looms above the city streets. Cerro Rico, or Rich Mountain, was the world’s most profitable source of silver. Carried across the ocean in galleons, dodging storms and English pirates (Francis Drake was said to have plundered about $600 million worth of silver in today’s money), it made the Spanish monarchs the wealthiest in Europe. It was the silver used to mint Spanish dollars, or pieces of eight, the world’s first international currency. It funded wars against the English, the Dutch, and the French. It is thought to have caused rampant inflation across Europe and sparked a global trade in luxury goods such as Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles.

In Potosí it financed the grandiose palaces and churches that line the narrow streets. Greed is in the very mortar of the buildings—exaggerated and self-important. In the basement of the colossal Casa Nacional de la Moneda, the national mint, I found the smelting rooms where enslaved Africans worked the furnaces in inhumane temperatures. The guide described how these poor souls never survived longer than six months.

Cerro Rico still towers over the rooftops. And silver, tin, and zinc continue to be mined here. In the course of yielding about 66,000 tons of silver, the mountain has also sent an estimated 9 million men to an early grave, the victims of silicosis, toxic gases, mercury poisoning, tunnel collapses, dynamite accidents, and sheer exhaustion. Local guides say that as many as 20,000 men still work in the mine in conditions that have hardly changed since the 16th century.