Six tourists wearing hard hats and heavy overalls sit, cramped up in a narrow mineshaft, with barely enough space to kneel. The local tour guide pulls out a disposable lighter, ignites a bright green ...
POTOSI, Bolivia — For more than 300 years the Spanish empire was fueled with silver mined in Potosí’s Cerro Rico, or “rich hill,” home to one of the largest veins of silver ore in the New World. The ...
Potosi, Bolivia. The (second) highest city on Earth. Home of Cerro Rico (rich mountain), the mountain that provided the ...
The miner squints into my headlamp, the shadow of his grotesquely swollen cheek looming along the rock surface behind him. Coca leaves are packed so tightly into his left cheek that he has to speak ...