Pictures Of Bolivia

Mined to Death: Why Bolivia's Cerro Rico Mountain is Collapsing

Ricardo Morales started mining Bolivia's Cerro Rico when he was 12, and he's proud of the mountain's majestic history. "It's said that the silver taken from here could have built a bridge from the peak to Spain's palace door," boasts the raspy-voiced Morales, 52, standing at the entrance to his mine some 14,000 feet (4,200 meters) above sea level. But today, after almost 500 years of non-stop extraction, the Cerro Rico's grandeur is collapsing — literally, like a titanic souffle. Earlier this year, a 3,767-sq-ft (339-sq-m) crater opened near the mountain's summit, and geologists warn of more implosions to come.

Yet that's not the worst part. Even though much of the exhausted Cerro Rico seems set to give way, miners like Morales insist on staying and plucking as much treasure as they can from the mountain, whose name means Rich Hill. That raises a larger specter of not only geologic but human loss, especially since the Bolivian government doesn't seem to be able to stop mining activity there. "I am a miner," says Morales, shrugging as he hunches down into his oxygen-scarce tunnel. "What else am I supposed to do?"

Indeed, for five centuries mining has been just about the only thing to do in Potosí, Bolivia, the city just beneath Cerro Rico that was once the western hemisphere's richest — a 17th-century Paris of the New World. The Cerro's silver funded Spain's colonial empire, and when the Spanish left in the 19th century, Potosinos started mining the mountain for themselves. Their earnings, however, have been minimal. Still, although Potosí is today the poorest state in the poorest country in South America, mining is what keeps the population afloat financially: more than half the city's 150,000 residents depend directly on the mines for their livelihoods.

Mining safety is a more acute issue today, especially after the Chilean mine rescue drama watched around the globe last year. Each day millions of people worldwide risk their lives underground for metals, coal and precious stones, and each year thousands are killed, often in the very cave-ins now threatening Cerro Rico — which is hardly a model of operational safety. It's more like a mammoth anthill with more than 650 separate, barely regulated entrances and hundreds of thousands of passageways that follow depleting zinc, tin and silver veins. Experts say infrastructure and machinery there are at least half a century behind the rest of the world: miners normally descend three-story shafts by harness and rope with pick-axes in hand; passageways are buttressed by rotting planks and, in some tunnels, toxic gas stings the eyes within minutes and can cause lung and muscle paralysis in a few hours.

Bolivia in Pictures

Bulletin of the Pan American Union

Bolivia in pictures

LIFE

Trekking in Bolivia, a traveler's guide