Sights

Just wandering around the centre of Potosí is fascinating in itself and will take you past many colonial buildings. While Viceroy Toledo tried to bring order to the city's layout in 1574, the boom had led to fast and unplanned development, which has left Potosí with a less-than-gridiron plan full of small streets with unexpected twists and turns - including the Pasaje de las Siete Vueltas(Seven Turn Passage), off Junín - which adds to the city's charm. There are lots of beautiful and ornate religious buildings well worth seeing - during the colonial period there were 32 churches in the city, and 22 of them still exist today. At the time, only Spaniards could attend services in the central churches and special churches where built in the periphery for the natives. These are still referred to as iglesias indígenas.

An active restoration project is permanently going on, organized by the city council and the Spanish Cooperation Agency, but there is a lot of work to do - the city boasts more than 2000 colonial buildings. Restoration work means buildings can be closed to visitors for months, so check with the tourist office if there is anywhere you particularly want to visit.

The centre

At the heart of the city is Plaza 10 de Noviembre, surrounded by some of Potosí's best buildings. The old Cabildo and Las Cajas Reales (the Royal Treasury) are both here, now converted to house the Prefectura, Alcaldía, and the court. On the north side of the plaza is the large, impressive cathedral iundergoing restoration since 2005 and expected to remain closed until about 2010.

Nearby is the Casa Nacional de Moneda, www.casanacionaldemoneda.org.bo. Founded in 1572, rebuilt 1759-1773, it is one of the chief monuments of civil building in Hispanic America. Thirty of its 160 rooms are a museum with sections on mineralogy, history and an art gallery in a splendid salon on the first floor. One section is dedicated to the works of the acclaimed 17th- to 18th-century religious painter Melchor Pérez de Holguín. Also featured are Gamarra, Berrio and Cruz. Displays cover the pre-colonial, colonial and republican periods and there are fascinating examples of the overlap of politics, economics and the Catholic mission. There is also a collection of indigenous costumes from the Potosí department and a section of silverware. Elsewhere are coin dies and huge wooden presses, which made the silver strips from which coins were cut. The smelting houses have carved altar pieces from Potosí's ruined churches. You cannot fail to notice the huge, grinning mask of Bacchus over an archway between two principal courtyards. Erected in 1865, its smile is said to be ironic and aimed at the departing Spanish. Wear warm clothes, as it is cold inside.

Visit the ornate mestizo-barroque style tower of the Jesuit Compañía de Jesus Church. The church was finished in 1707, with an impressive bell-gable. Within the tower is a Miradori. At the bottom of Calle Ayacucho, on the corner with Chichas, is the convent, church and Museo de Santa Teresai. The building was started in 1685 and has an impressive amount of giltwork inside. There is an eye-opening collection of flagellation tools, colonial paintings, religious architecture and furniture. At the end of a visit you can buy quesitos, sweets made by the nuns according to a 300-year-old tradition.

The imposing façade of the Teatro Omiste was finished in 1753 as the Belén Church. It has since been a hospital, royalist headquarters in 1823 during the wars of independence (the royalists knocked down the twin towers of the church in order to improve their cannon emplacements), a theatre from 1862 and then a cinema in the 20th century, before returning to life as a theatre and now also Café Mirador Belén.

The San Martín Church was built by indigenous people forced to come and work in Potosí. It has an uninviting exterior, but has one of the most ornately decorated interiors of any church in Bolivia, with oil paintings and giltwork.

Potosí's first church, built in 1547, is the Museo y Convento de San Francisco. The current building, begun in 1707, has the oldest-surviving cloisters in Bolivia. It has a fine organ, a museum of ecclesiastical art, with more than 200 paintings including one of Melchor Pérez de Holguín's best works, The Erection of the Cross and an under-ground tunnel system. Don't miss going up on the roof, which has good views.

Walk around and admire the architecture. Calle Quijarro is one of Potosí's best- preserved streets, in colonial times it was known as Calle de la Ollería (potmakers) and Calle de los Sombreros (hats).

The Museo Universitario has an eclectic collection of archaeology, fossils and minerals, local costumes, old musical instruments and a good display of contemporary Bolivian painting.

On Calle Héroes del Chaco, is the ornate 18th-century mestizo-baroque façade of the San Lorenzo Church (1728-1744) , with a rich portal and fine views from the tower. The first church on this site, La Anunciación, one of the first built in the city, collapsed in 1557 after a heavy snowfall. You can get a good view over the whole city from San Cristóbal Churchiat Pacheco y Cañete, one of the 'iglesias indígenas'.

Museo Etno-indumentario has a thorough and very interesting display of the different dress and customs and their histories of Potosí department's 16 provinces.

Outside the centre

To the south of the centre of the city are the Ingenios de la Riveraarea where the ore mined from Cerro Rico was processed. This was the biggest industrial area in the world at the start of the 17th century.

To the west of the city is the hill of Pari Orckoor 'eagle's nest'. On top of it sits a great big tower, the Mirador Pari Orcko, with excellent views.  In the neighbourhood of Ciudad Satélite is the Museo de la Plata with information about smelting and engraving silver and displays of silverware and jewellery.

Mine tours

Most people come to Potosí for the incredible experience of visiting one of the myriad mine workings of the infamous Cerro Rico,the pink conical mountain that towers 700 m above the city.

Cerro Rico was described by one Spanish chronicler in the mid-16th century as “the mouth of hell”, and visitors should be aware that descending into its bowels can be both physically and emotionally draining. The deeper you go, the warmer it gets and the narrower and lower the tunnel will be; if you go deep enough, you need to crouch and eventually even crawl. The mine entrances are above 4000 m and you will be walking around breathing in noxious gases and seeing people working in appalling conditions in temperatures up to 40°C. You should be acclimatized, fit and not have any heart or breathing problems, such as asthma. Most miners develop silicosis after a few years.

Tours vary, so find one which is suitable for you. Some agencies pride themselves on taking visitors as deep in as possible, making the experience quite demanding, but this is not the only way of experiencing the mines. On the upper levels you will also be inside a mine, observing miners at work and interacting with them. Make sure you get a helmet, lamp and protective clothing (but wear old clothes anyway). The time you spend inside the mine varies from one tour to another, some stay in almost four hours, which is as long as miners stay at one time, and probably excessive.

The tour begins with a visit to Mercado Calvario, where you are expected to buy presents for the miners such as dynamite, coca leaves, meths, ammonium nitrate and cigarettes. Then it's up to the mine where you get kitted up and enter one of the tunnels. A tour might go down all the way to the fourth level, meeting and talking to working miners on the way. You will see how dynamite is used and also meet El Tío, the god of the underworld (Friday afternoon is the main day for making offerings to El Tío). A good guide will be able to explain mining practices, customs and traditions (little changed since the Spanish left) and enable you to communicate with the miners. There is no problem with women visiting the mines. Women worked the mines during the Chaco War 1932-35, female miners are called palliri. Some tours also include some sort of dynamite pyrotechnics, which, in principle, is illegal. A contribution to the miners' cooperative as well as medicines for the health centre (posta sanitaria) on Cerro Rico are appreciated. Saturday and Sunday are the quietest days (Sunday is the miners' day off).

There are over 5000 mine shafts snaking their way through Cerro Rico. The Spaniards introduced the use of socavones, horizontal galleries to intersect workings, allowing simpler access, ventilation and drainage and much deeper mines. But at the lowest depths of the mines, ventilation is scarce. If a miner finds a vein of ore, he starts chipping away at it and follows it along. It may happen that someone else found the same vein approaching it from a different tunnel and they work it until they meet. The mountain is like a giant Swiss cheese and there are concerns of an eventual immense collapse.

The mines visited on tours are in the hands of miner's cooperatives. When the Comibol mines where privatized in the 1980s, miners formed these cooperatives and continued working for themselves. Over time however, cooperative members or cooperativistas started hiring peones, labourers, who for a meagre salary do the dirty dangerous work for them. Today there are far more peonesthan cooperativistas. Miners work alone or in pairs, the cooperative members sell what the labourers extract at the market price and the cooperative gets a percentage. As they have to go deeper and deeper, conditions are, if anything, even more dangerous than in colonial times.