The silver mountain in the Bolivian Andes whose ore bankrolled the Spanish empire and helped build the first global economy — and beneath which generations of conscripted Andean and enslaved African workers died in the mines and the mercury refineries. For a time one of the largest cities on Earth, its name became Spanish for a fortune, and Andean memory called its peak the mountain that eats men.
By around 1600, a town nearly four thousand meters up in the Andes had grown into one of the largest cities in the world, rivaling London or Paris, because of a single mountain. The Cerro Rico, the Rich Hill, held one of the richest silver deposits ever worked, and Spain dug it out to pay for its wars and its empire. So much silver poured out that the phrase vale un Potosí, worth a Potosí, became Spanish for a fortune beyond counting. But the wealth was torn from the ground by men who did not choose to be there. The Spanish forced Andean villages to send workers down the shafts and into refineries full of poison mercury, and brought enslaved Africans as well. How many died over the centuries is genuinely uncertain and fiercely argued, with estimates running into the hundreds of thousands and, in some popular accounts, far higher. The people who lived beside it gave the mountain a name that holds the whole story at once: the mountain that eats men.