Metropolitan Cathedral, Potosí: a colonial church on the plaza of a mountain that may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives

On the Plaza 10 de Noviembre, in the heart of the Bolivian city of Potosí, the metropolitan cathedral is the third religious building to stand on this site. A first church dates to 1548, rebuilt from 1564 to a design attributed, according to a single source not found elsewhere, to Juan Miguel de la Veramendi, and it collapsed in 1807 following unauthorised renovation works that had undermined its stability. The present building was begun on 6 September 1808 to a design by the Spanish Franciscan friar Manuel de Sanahuja, credited with introducing the neoclassical style to Potosí — again a claim found only in encyclopaedic sources, not in an independent architectural-historical study. It was completed in 1836 and solemnly consecrated on 4 April 1838 under the presidency of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz. The resulting style is a hybrid of late-colonial Baroque and neoclassical elements, rather than pure neoclassicism. Potosí owes its extraordinary history to the silver deposits of the Cerro Rico, worked from 1545, which made the city one of the chief sources of the Spanish empire’s wealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The population grew from around fourteen thousand inhabitants in 1547 to between one hundred and fifty and one hundred and sixty thousand around 1600, making Potosí for a time the most populous city in the Americas and, according to a figure recurring in secondary sources but not confirmed in a primary demographic source, the second most populous city in the world after London. This wealth rested on the mita system, a forced-labour institution of Inca origin formalised in 1573 by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, which compelled thousands of indigenous Andean men to work the mines and refineries in inhuman conditions, alongside enslaved African labour used chiefly in refining and minting. The overall death toll remains a matter of historiographical dispute: the figure of eight million dead is often cited in popular culture, but according to some sources derives from an estimate for the entire Viceroyalty of Peru rather than specifically for the mines of Potosí, for which other sources put the toll in the hundreds of thousands. This figure should be treated with caution, not as a definitively established one. Inside the cathedral are kept reliquaries in gold and silver and an organ donated by the mining magnate Simón I. Patiño. The celebrated colonial paintings tied to Potosí’s mining wealth, among them works by Melchor Pérez de Holguín and the iconic “Virgen del Cerro”, are found not in the cathedral but in the nearby museum of the Casa Nacional de la Moneda, the former royal mint, a separate building a short walk from the same square. The city of Potosí was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger on 17 June 2014, because of the risk of structural collapse of the Cerro Rico linked to mining activity still under way. A sinkhole that opened at the mountain’s summit in 2011 was filled with lightweight concrete, and Bolivian authorities have since filled around 95 per cent of the 132 subsidence zones identified, though the site was still listed as endangered according to the latest UNESCO Committee decision found, from 2024.