Potosí

The vision conveyed a sense of peace, comforting Yupan-ki and reinforcing his belief that a physical image of the Virgin Mary was meant to be created specifically for the healing and unity of his people.

Advised by relatives, Yupanqui went to Potosi, which had outstanding teachers of sacred image sculpting.

Potosi is a major historic city located in the south central highlands of Bolivia, resting at an extreme high altitude of about 13,000 feet above sea level.

During the colonial era, Potosi was one of the wealthiest and most important cities in the Spanish Empire because it sits directly beneath the Cerro Rico, or Rich Hill, which produced staggering amounts of silver.

Yupanchi lived there around 1582 to 1583 to study under master woodcarvers and image makers, specifically in the workshop of Maestro Diego Ortiz.

Yupanchi studied fine religious sculpture and used his newly honed skills to carve the refined definitive image of Our Lady of Copacabana out of mage wood.

With his newly developed skill, he revolved to create an improved image of the Candelaria that had been rejected before.

He looked through the churches of Potosi for an image of the Virgin which could serve as a model, finally finding the best one in the convent of Santo Domingo, to the Virgin del Rosario.

A city grew at its foot almost overnight.

By around 1650, Potosí had roughly 160,000 people, larger than most major European cities of the day.

Potosi's silver was minted into coins that circulated around the world, including the famous Spanish pieces of eight.

Those coins were so widely trusted that they were legal tender in the United States until 1857, and they gave the American dollar its name.

And after the conquest, the Spanish established a mining economy across New Spain that was one of the largest and most profitable extractive operations in human history.

The silver mines of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Potosí produced staggering quantities of precious metal that flowed back to Spain and funded the Spanish Empire's ambitions in Europe and around the world.

Mining was not a side enterprise of the colonial project.

It was the colonial project, or at least its economic engine, and it depended almost entirely on the forced labor of indigenous peoples.

But this great inland country is noted the world around for its rich mines.

Mount Potosí is often spoken of as a mountain of silver.

It is said that not only millions but billions of dollars' worth of silver have been taken from this one mountain.

There are said to be six thousand abandoned mines on its slopes, to say nothing of the hundreds that are being worked today.

The city of Potosí used to be the largest city in the western hemisphere and was ten times its present size when the early settlements of the United States were but small villages.

While the silver in this mountain is not nearly exhausted by any means, yet it was discovered that deeper down is a mountain of tin.

Bolivia has been furnishing more than one-fourth of the world's supply of tin for many years.

On the hills back of the city of Potosí can still be seen the thirty-two lakes or reservoirs that used to furnish water for the city and mines.

Okay.

I want to obviously talk to you about your sort of two projects, the Silver Sun project in Potosi and Corangas in Oruro.

Yeah.

Um, but before we get into that, we are here at an investor conference, so let me ask you about, uh, investor interest in Bolivia.

All they need is a environmental license for both of these projects.

And internally, we're equally distributing our financial resource and the human resource to push these two projects' permitting, uh, progress simultaneously.

We have two Uh, local teams in place, one based in Potosi to handle the, uh, so- uh, Silver Sand project's, uh, permitting, uh, matters.

The other one based in Oruro province, uh, which is where Corangus project is, uh, to handle Corangus matters.

Um, Brazil, which, uh, by the mid-1640s, the Dutch controlled not just half, but really the most productive half of the country, that ultimately, uh, falls back to Portugal in 1654.

The efforts to attack Potosí through, uh, Chile, uh, and a couple other, uh, routes, all of those, uh, end in spectacular failure.

So you could look at this, um, uh, and say, really, this company, you know, emerged, uh, was, uh, badly managed, uh, and then ends in this kind of failure.

Ultimately, the company goes bankrupt and has to be, be reorganized.

Once that was accomplished though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish imperial orbit, the first empire in which the sun never sets.

Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosí, what's now, um, Bolivia, uh, they put the last piece in puzzle for, of the puzzle in place for, for true globalization, right? Initially, the gold and silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of, of, of King Philip V, and, uh, sorry, King Charles V, then his son, uh, King Philip II, for their wars of evangelical, uh, defense and expansion against the Ottomans, um, to keep the Netherlands under their control, to ideally, through the Armada, bring the one true Apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England.

Um, most of those ventures, of course, were failures.

And as you say, um, the net impact for Spain was, was ultimately quite negative because by infusing Europe with this enormous expansion in liquidity through the silver that was pouring off the treasure ships every year arriving, uh, i, i- in Spain, um, all they were doing was importing inflation, right, pushing prices up to levels.

But this great inland country is noted the world around for its rich mines.

Mount Potosi is often spoken of as a mountain of silver.

It is said that not only millions but billions of dollars' worth of silver have been taken from this one mountain.

There are said to be six thousand abandoned mines on its slopes, to say nothing of the hundreds that are being worked today.

The city of Potosi used to be the largest city in the Western Hemisphere and was ten times its present size when the early settlements of the United States were but small villages.

While the silver in this mountain is not nearly exhausted by any means, yet it was discovered that deeper down is a mountain of tin.

Bolivia has been furnishing more than one-fourth of the world's supply of tin for many years.

On the hills back of the city of Potosi can still be seen the thirty-two lakes or reservoirs that used to furnish water for the city and mines.