Potosi

The altitude hits before the history does. At 4,090 meters, Potosi is one of the highest cities on earth, and the first thing I felt stepping off the bus from Sucre was the air retreating — thin, cold, laced with the faint mineral smell that drifts down from Cerro Rico, the rust-red mountain presiding over everything like an unforgiving patriarch. They say eight million people died in those mines over three centuries. The number is too large to hold.

The Weight of the Mountain

Cerro Rico — the Rich Mountain — is impossible to ignore. From every street in the city it dominates the skyline, its cone-shaped summit pocked with mine entrances and exhaust vents that have been working since 1545. Lia stood at the Plaza 10 de Noviembre and stared up at it for a long time. “It looks exhausted,” she said, and she was right. The mountain has been hollowed from within for nearly five hundred years and is said to be slowly collapsing.

We walked along Calle Bolivar toward the Casa de la Moneda, the former royal mint where Spanish silver was pressed into pieces of eight for export to Seville and Madrid and beyond. The building is enormous — a fortress disguised as a bureaucracy — and inside, the machinery of empire is still there: the wooden rolling presses that slaves and indigenous workers operated until they broke. The museum is excellent and brutal in equal measure.

Baroque in the Thin Air

What surprised me was the beauty. I had braced for a city shaped entirely by grief, but Potosi’s colonial center is one of the most remarkable in the Americas: narrow streets paved with smooth stone, facades of pink sandstone carved with figures that blend Catholic iconography with Andean symbols, doorways worn smooth by centuries of hands. The Cathedral on the Plaza faces the mountains with a kind of defiant grandeur.

The unexpected discovery came on our second evening. We followed a faint smell of frying oil down Calle Oruro and found a woman selling api — a thick, deep-purple drink made from purple corn, clove, and cinnamon, served piping hot in ceramic cups. Beside her, a brazier of buñuelos — fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. No sign, no menu, no chairs. We stood in the cold street and ate standing, the warmth working its way down through the altitude. I have had more elaborate meals that meant far less.

Living at Altitude

Acclimatization in Potosi is not optional. The first morning I woke with a headache that sat behind my eyes like a wedge and moved no faster than I did. Mate de coca — coca leaf tea — appeared with every meal and at the front desk of our hostel on Calle Ayacucho; it helps. So does moving slowly, drinking more water than feels necessary, and abandoning any plan that involves hurrying.

The light here is peculiar to altitude: sharper than it should be, the shadows more absolute, the blue of the midday sky almost violent. Photographed from the Plaza del Minero, the miners’ memorial, the city looks timeless — red rooftops, white towers, the mountain above, clouds trailing from its peak like smoke.

When to go: April to October is the dry season and the most comfortable window for visiting. July and August are coldest at night — temperatures drop well below freezing — but the skies are clear and the light extraordinary. Avoid the wet season (November to March) when roads into the region can become difficult.