Tucked away in the heart of Bolivia’s Altiplano plateau lies a small, unassuming town, which is the only place on earth where you can legally buy dynamite. This peculiar claim to fame has earned the town a reputation as a hub for explosives, attracting a mix of locals, miners, and adventurous tourists.
A UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Site (WHS), the city of Potosi is at the southern end of the Bolivian Altiplano. It has a vast mining network dating back hundreds of years. All day long, miners pull carts filled with broken rock down ancient railroad lines as they go up and down long and narrow corridors.
“For the miners, the most essential thing is dynamite,” Jhonny Condori, a Potosi mine tour guide, told CNN. “If you don’t know how to handle it, it’s dangerous.”
Potosi is one of the highest cities in the world, rising more than 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) above sea level. Much of the mining takes place in the nearby red “Cerro Rico” (literally, “Rich Mountain” in English), which was given its name due to the enormous wealth it formerly gave to the city. “Today, Potosi is regarded as one of the poorest areas in Bolivia,” another local tour guide, Julio Vera Ayarachi, told CNN.
Legend has it that an indigenous Andean prospector named Diego Gualpa made the initial discovery of Cerro Rico’s rich silver resources around 1545. Spanish colonists, who had just recently arrived in the area, soon learnt of the find and started taking advantage of the mountain’s wealth of silver.
By the end of the 16th century, Potosi grew to become the fourth-biggest city in the Christian world. Home to over 200,000 people, the city was said to have provided 60 per cent of the silver in the world at the time.
Eventually, the silver supplies that seemed limitless at the time started to run out. Nearly all the silver had been extracted by the time Bolivia proclaimed its independence in 1825 and Potosi devolved into a shadow of its former glory.
Even while mining is on, much of it is for less expensive minerals like zinc and tin. The mountain has turned unstable due to hundreds of kilometres of mining shafts. It is now the “most dangerous time that the mines have witnessed”.
Life expectancy for Bolivian miners is thought to be as low as 40 years. Common early deaths result from frequent accidents in the mines and silicosis, a chronic lung disease caused by breathing in silica.
While the legal minimum working age in Bolivia is 14 years old, there are loopholes that allow children to start working much earlier. Children as young as six may still be employed in Bolivian mines, according to some sources.
