As I saw Potosi for the first time I started to hope for the first time that it wasn´t where we would be staying - it looked grim. It is the highest city in the world at over 4000m and is a sprawl of tightly packed houses dominated by the mountain Cerro Rico which has been a silver mine since the 1500s. On the outskirts we passed a woman picking through a rubbish pile with a toddler wearing an incongruously bright jesters hat. Once inside the city it is less of a depressing sight but as with so many towns in Bolivia the overriding colours are grey and brown. In the main square there are a couple of trees but elsewhere in some of the smaller squares there are raised beds with green grass in them though they are fenced off and have barbed wire stretched over the top to stop even the birds and animals from standing on the precious green horticultural offering.
Potosi still has 12000 miners working in the mine extracting tin, zinc and silver. They still work in the same way as they did hundreds of years ago with no lifts or machinary, extracting by hand with pick axes. Since it opened it is estimated that between 8 and 9 million people have died in the mine and even now there is an average of one death a week.
Tourists can go down and see the mines in small groups and the money they pay for the tour goes towards the miners co-operative. We got kitted out in waterproof clothing, hard hats, headlights and wellies before visiting the market to buy gifts for the miners. We each buy an assortment of dynamite, coca leaves, 98% proof alcohol. This must be the only place in the world where anyone can buy these in the street - it is a slightly worrying mix to have in the shopping basket. From the market we drove up the mountain and I was perturbed to hear the voice of one of the people in our group, who happens to be the most accident prone individual I have ever encountered, exclaim "whoops guys I´ve dropped my dynamite and its rolling around in the back here". On top of the mine we pulled up infront of an ominous little chapel where our guide showed us how the miners prepare the pale green nitro glycerin, which resembled playdoh, with the fuse and detonator. It was then put inside a bag containing the more volatile amonium nitrate, the fuse was lit and then the powerful concoction was passed around us. It was like a grown up version of pass the parcel but the participants looked a little more nervous and were keen to forward the package more quickly and definately didn´t want to be holding it when the hissing fuse stopped. Maybe that explained the proximity to the chapel - should anything have gone wrong we would probably have been blown in through the doors without the need even for pall bearers. As the fuse continued to burn our guide´s slightly older and somewhat overweight assistant took the hissing package and ran some way down the hill before hurredly burying it in the ground. It was a bizarely comical sight to see this rotund figure wobbling down the mountain knowing what he had in his hand and there was that little bit of me that began to wonder what would happen if he tripped ...... When it blew you could feel it all the way through your body At the entrance to the mine the walls are daubed anually with the blood of a sacrificed llama. This is to give something back to Pachamama or Motherearth, the god from whom they take the minerals. The llama is then buried at the mouth of the mine to feed Pachamama in the hope that she will not feel the need to take the lives of the miners instead. Children as young as 13 work in the mines and life expectancy is 40 years of age - they need all the divine help they can get. The other god that the miners worship and make offerings to is El Diablo - the devil. Inside the mine there are numerous effigies which every friday the miners daub with alcohol and give cigarettes and coca to. They also partake of huge quantities of the alcohol themselves which tends to be when a lot of the accidents happen so they don´t advise doing the mine tours on a friday. In the early days of the mine the spaniards told the enslaved miners that the devil would be watching them if they didn´t work hard. The slave population later realised that the spaniards catholic religion feared and hated the devil so they started to follow the old addage that my enemy´s enemy is my friend and the worship continues to this day. We spent the morning scrambling through the mines. Many of the tunnels are so small that you spend much of the time bent double and still constantly banging your head on the rock. We often had to climb up and down 15ft rockfaces between shafts with no ladders, trying hard to find any kind of hand or foot hold. Elsewhere small rocks would be piled up and as we climbed on them we set off small rockslides onto those climbing behind us. The air is really thin so it is exhausting and we weren´t even doing any work. After a few hours we were all keen to leave and we had the luxury of spending the afternoon lazing in some thermal springs up in the surrounding mountains. The miners have no such release to look forward to at the end of their hard days. You begin to understand why they drink such strong alcohol. Once again I am thankful that my ancestors choice of homeland mean that I have the privelidges that I do and I can only start to guess at how difficult life must be for others.
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Potosi Hotels
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