This city used to be a very rich and popular city before Bolivia became a Spanish colony. In fact, from the visit of the Coin museum, I came to know a lots of very inteesting facts about this place. Unfortunately, this city is not a rich city any more. But the history is very impressive. We went to a silver mine and I happened to meet the two brothers who were in the Delvil´s miner when they were much younger. I had pictures with them. The documentory is very good and quite painful but worth watching. I saw the film in the next city we went after Potosi. How the Spanish made the locals believe that there is a devil in the mine and they have to always worship the devil not to be in trouble while doing the mining. The life of the miners are at high risk and the young childern also work in the mines for supporting the family. Silicosis is a death threat for all miners at the age of only 40-45, and it is a great shame that knowingly people still need to do the work for supporting their families. I think children should be kept out of this completely, but it seems in some families, it is a tradition to go for mining jobs as their previous generation did the same. In some families, they have no much choice but taking up such jobs. We took pictures with the statue of the devil inside the mine and of how they make offerings to the devil for keeping him happy. They even sacrifice llama and the blood of llama is given to the devil with coca leaves and other offerings. We were given a demonstration how a dynamite is blasted in the mine, although we did it outside the mine. This was to show us the miners do it inside the mine for finding valuable metals like silver to dig and reach deeper inside the mine. These days, most of them do not get silver anymore, mostly it is Zinc. The miners make good living compared to the rest of the habitants of Potosi, but risk of life is very high.
The food in Potosi was quite good and I had llama steak one of the nights in Potosi and the other meals were quite nice as well. I only did the basic trip to the mine, some did the advanced one, I could not breath very well inside so decided to do te basic one, it was still a great experience and this was my 2nd mine visit in my entire life. I had to visit a coal mine once in 1993 from IITD, it was more risky but I was healthier then and it was part of the Geology trip that we all had to do as a compulsury part of our program.
We left Potosi after 2 days and went to one of the capitals of Bolivia, the white city, Sucre.
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