There are 455 mines in Cerro Rico, the famous peak where the Spaniards first found silver over 400 years ago. Currently, 120 of them are still being exploited by 7,000 miners grouped on about 50 cooperatives. So I don't think it's exaggerating to imagine the interior of this mountain as a giant Gruyère cheese.
Knowing that there are 7,000 miners working on 120 uncoordinated mines using dynamite inside the mountain that you are about to visit is not precisely a calming fact. I have the feeling that sooner or later Cerro Rico will collapse under its own weight, as no engineer supervises these explosions and it's impossible for each cooperative to know the direction on which the neighboring mines are expanding. In fact, I recently read that 10 years ago an American geological survey predicted that the mountain would collapse in 7 years, so my prediction is not excesively pesimistic.
Some people claim that visiting the mines is a perverse type of tourism than makes an attraction out of people working in horrendous conditions. While I could understand their opinion, I think that visiting the mines actually makes a lot of people (like me) more sensitive to the tough conditions that miners face everyday. In fact, I have the feeling that most tours are designed with that solely purpose (I'm sure ours was), and nobody that has visited the mines will tell you that is an enjoyable experience or something they would like to do again. Additionaly, most agencies donate 15% of their income to the miners themselves and all visitors buy presents to the miners, so I think that if these tours affect the miners in any way is positively.
The first thing we did when we were picked up by our guides, former miners themselves, was head to the Miners Market, where miners buy their own supplies. There you can find such diverse things as head torches, rechargable batteries, helmets, soft drinks, coca leaves, 96 degrees alcohol (that's 192 proof!!) and... DYNAMITE!! For a dollar you can buy a stick of dynamite, a detonator and a 2-meter long fuse. Coming from a country that has suffered terrorism for so many years, it was quite shocking to discover how easy it was to purchase this material here.
Following our guides' advice of what miners needed the most, we bought coca leaves, soft drinks and, of course, dynamite (the Argentinian one, that was of better quality). Before leaving the market we had a sip of that 96º alcohol and all I can say is that the label, that read "buen gusto" (good taste), seemed to me like a really sick joke.
Nowadays silver is no longer found in pure state, so what the miners extract are compound minerals whose basic elements are separated using "nature-friendly" chemicals such as cyanide or sulfuric acid (I don't need to tell you how healthy the rivers around Potosí are). The main minerals obtained after the chemical process are silver, tin, lead and copper, which are then exported as powder to other countries for further processing.
After visiting one of these "ingenios" (factories) that separate the minerals and walking around toxic chemicals driping over crushed rocks with no protection at all (a bit disturbing experience) and hearing some fine examples of simplistic victimism regarding global trade ("big countries set the prices of minerals to screw up poor countries"), we headed for the mine of Candelaria. Candelaria is around 4,300 m. high and dates from the Colonial times.
We chewed coca leaves to help prevent altitude sickness and entered what I though was a quite low gallery, but would later discover that it was the largest one. We stopped at a museum inside the mine that contained some interesting information together with some shocking (and, in my opinion, completely untrue) facts.
For example, 8 million people are claimed to be killed by the Spaniards in Potosí. Taking the city's peak population (160,000 by the XVI century) and assuming a generation gap of 20 years, it would mean that the Spaniards killed every single person in Potosí for over 1,000 years. Or otherwise, if you consider that at the peak time there were 15,000 miners working on Cerro Rico and that Spain exploited the mines for less than 300 years, it would mean that every miner died (or was killed by the Spaniards, to use the same words as the museum) after only 6 months of work. But hey, why let logic or statistics ruin a wonderful Spain-bashing claim.
Anyway, after the museum the real fun begun. We started the visit of the mine, and I must say that is the most claustrophobic experience I've ever had. We entered 1 km. inside the mine, and descended 100 m to the last level (level 4). We had to crawl on less than one-meter high tunnels (remaining with your hands on the ground if the person before you stopped), descend through slippery holes where you couldn't see the end and had little to grab to, run away from the trolleys that the miners use to transport the minerals (the galleries are very narrow, so when you sense a trolley is coming you have to escape to a wider area before you get run over). At level 4, we had to pass through a hole so narrow that I had to leave my backbag behind. And at the other side of the tunnel things didn't improve much: I had to lay on my back, having the celing of the room 20 cm. above my nose. I was not claustrophobic before, but I was for the entire visit to the mine.
Miners work in 10-hour shifts (sometime double) and the eat nothing all day, they simply chew coca leaves (good for altitude and to eliminate the sense of hunger), drink soft drinks to preven dehydratation and to get the sugar they need for their work, and at the end of the day or before their day off, have a sip of the terribly strong 96º alcohol. Before drinking or eating anything, they spill part of it on the ground to offer it to the Pacha Mama (Mother Earth) and the Tío (the Devil that habits inside the mine).
The conditions the miners stand during their work are truly extreme. 2-ton trolleys are pushed by hand, holes for dynamite are digged with hammers and 50-kg sacks are filled with shovels and lifted by a manual polley to the higher levels. An average miner can load up to 500 50-kg sacks using just his shovel in a single day. Add to that the thin air at 4,300 m, the high temperatures of over 30°C, the narrow tunnels, the complete darkness, the toxic particles floating in the air and having no food (just coca leaves) for the entire 10-hour shift. No electricity, no oxygen pushed in from outside, no mechanical aids. These are the conditions that miners, some of them only 16 years old, face every single day.
Believe me, just walking up and down those galleries for 3 and a half hours and seeing the miners work was a truly disturbing experience. The fatigue (and we had done nothing but walking), the narrow spaces, the lack of air, the high temperatures and the dusty atmosphere made breathing truly difficult. When we started climbing up, we had to stop every few meters simply to recover our breath, which at certain moments I felt I would be unable to do. I have never been happier that when I finally saw the day-light after walking along a seemingly endless first-level gallery.
Although an extremely interesting and learning experience, the visit to the Candelaria mine has been the only thing I've done in this trip that I'm completely certain I will never do again.
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