Potosí, Bolivia

The wealth that spilled from the hills of the altiplano city of Potosí financed dreams and revolutions; now the spoils of its 16th-century silver boom scatter its UNESCO-listed streets, writes Shafik Meghji

- Shafik Meghji

Around 1545, so the story goes, a herder named Diego Huallpa climbed a mountain in the altiplano, an Andean plateau stretching across what is now western Bolivia, in search of a missing llama, only to stumble upon a seam of silver. The recently overthrown Inca empire considered this peak to be sacred, but the Spanish conquistadors, who had heard about the discovery, swiftly started mining. The mountain, which became known as Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), proved to be the greatest source of silver in history.

At its foot developed the city of Potosí, which grew to become one of the wealthiest and most industrialised places on the planet in the 16th and 17th centuries. Home to some of Latin America's finest examples of architecture, at least one street was literally paved with silver. In the novel Don Quixote, published in the early 1600s, the eponymous knight remarks to his squire, Sancho Panza, 'It's worth a Potosí'- aka a fortune. The legend on the city's coat of arms even boasted: 'I am rich Potosí, treasure of the world, king of the mountains, envy of kings.'

Cerro Rico's silver had a seismic impact. It created global trading networks, propped up the Spanish empire and helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the Western world. But it came at a horrific cost. So many Indigenous people and enslaved Africans died in the mines and processing plants that Cerro Rico became known as 'the mountain that eats men'.