City of Potosí Bolivia

City of Potosí - Bolivia

Short Report

In the 16th century this area was regarded as the world's largest industrial complex. The extraction of silver professions ore on a number of hydraulic mills. The site comprises the industrial monuments of the Cerro Rico, where water is supplied by a complex system of aqueducts and artificial lakes; the colonial city with the Casa de la Moneda, the Church of San Lorenzo; various patrician houses; and the barrios mitayos, the areas where the workers lived.

Wide Report

In the time before the Spanish conquest, In The was only a small hamlet situated at a height of 4000 m, in the icy solitude of the Andes. It owes its prosperity to the discovery, between 1542 and 1545, of the New the world's largest silver hope in the Cerro In The, in the mountains to the south of the city and overlooks the. As a result. In the is direct and tangible associated with an event of excellent universal interpretation: the economic changes brought about in the 16th century by the flood of Spanish currency as a result of the massive imports of precious metals from the New World in Seville.

The 'Imperial City' of Potosí, which he after the visit of Francisco de Toledo in 1572, exerted lasting influence on the development of the architecture and monumental art in the central region of the Andes by the distribution of the forms of a baroque style with Indian influences. Growth was very fast: in the new city, where building began under the conditions of the Law of the Indies in 1572, there were 160,000 settlers in the 17th century, as well as 13,500 Indians who were forced to work in the mines. After a period of poorly organised exploitation of the indigenous silver hope, the Cerro the reached full production capacity in the after 1580, when a Peruvian developed mining technique, known as terrace, was carried out. In the 16th century this area was regarded as the world's largest industrial complex in which the extraction of silver professions ore on a number of hydraulic mills.

In it is the only example par excellence of a huge silver mine in modern times. The city and the region retain spectacular traces of this activity: the industrial infrastructure consists of 22 lagunas or shells, from which a forced flow of water produce the hydraulic power to activate the 140 los ingenios or mills times silver ore. The ore was then merged with mercury in refractory furnaces or guayras huayras called grounding. Then was cast in bars and stamped with the mark of the Royal Mint. From the mine to the Royal Mint, the entire production chain is preserved, together with dams, aqueducts, milling centers and the ovens. The production remained until the 18th century, just slows down after independence in 1825.

The site comprises the industrial monuments of the Cerro Rico, where water is supplied by a complex system of aqueducts and artificial lakes; the colonial city with the Casa de la Moneda, the Church of San Lorenzo; various patrician houses; and the barrios mitayos, the areas where the workers lived. The Casa de la Moneda (House of the Mint), in the center of the city near the Square of the Republic, was built between 1753 and 1773. The house is now a numismatic museum. It has more than 100 colonial photos and various archaeological and ethnographic collections. The church of San Francisco was the first church built during the colonial period; the houses the patron of Potosí, El Senor de la Vera Cruz. The church of San Lorenzo was built in 1548; this is an excellent example of dressed stone in the local Baroque style.

Source:whc/unesco