Potosí rose with extraordinary speed after rich silver ore was identified at Cerro Rico in 1545. Spanish accounts credited the discovery to Diego Huallpa, an Indigenous prospector, although local communities already knew the mountain and its mineral landscape. A mining settlement grew at more than four thousand meters above sea level and became an imperial city whose silver entered global trade. The mountain, called Sumaj Orcko in Quechua, was transformed into shafts, tunnels, waste heaps, refineries, reservoirs, churches, markets, and neighborhoods divided by occupation and legal status.

Early miners exploited high-grade ore with Indigenous technologies and charcoal furnaces, while merchants supplied food, timber, textiles, mercury, and animals from across the Andes. After ore quality declined, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganized production in the 1570s. Mercury amalgamation allowed lower-grade material to be processed in water-powered mills. A vast system of artificial lakes, dams, and channels delivered energy to refining works below the mountain. These innovations made Potosí one of the world's largest industrial complexes and sent coin and bullion through Lima, Panama, Seville, Manila, and markets far beyond the Spanish Empire.

Silver wealth depended on coercion. Toledo imposed the colonial mita, compelling rotating drafts of Indigenous men from distant Andean provinces to labor in mines and mills. Families traveled with workers, settled in barrios de indios, traded, brewed, carried ore, and struggled to survive cold, dust, mercury, accidents, and exhausting shifts. Free and wage labor also existed, and some Indigenous entrepreneurs gained influence, but the system's unequal burdens devastated communities. Enslaved Africans worked especially in domestic service, workshops, and the mint, adding another forced population to the city's complex social order.

The first royal mint opened in the sixteenth century, and the monumental Casa de la Moneda was constructed between 1759 and 1773 as production methods and imperial controls changed. Heavy machinery, mule power, furnaces, offices, and secure courtyards converted silver into widely circulating coins. Potosí's prosperity funded elaborate churches, religious brotherhoods, theater, lawsuits, and conspicuous consumption. It also provoked corruption and conflict, including violent factional struggles among Spanish groups. The familiar phrase worth a Potosí expressed fabulous wealth while concealing the human and environmental costs that created it.

Production fluctuated after the seventeenth-century peak, and independence warfare further disrupted the city. Republican Bolivia continued mining silver and later tin, while the mint produced coins until the twentieth century before becoming a museum. Cooperative miners still work Cerro Rico under dangerous conditions. Centuries of excavation have destabilized the mountain, causing collapses and threatening its iconic profile. The contrast between minerals extracted for distant prosperity and persistent local poverty has made Cerro Rico a powerful symbol in debates about colonialism, labor rights, national development, and global responsibility.

UNESCO inscribed the City of Potosí in 1987, including Cerro Rico, the hydraulic system, colonial neighborhoods, churches, patrician houses, and Casa de la Moneda. Continuing uncontrolled mining led to placement on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2014. Preservation cannot simply freeze the mountain, because thousands of families depend on its active economy. Potosí is therefore both monument and workplace: an exceptional urban-industrial landscape that helped finance early modern globalization, and a living community still confronting the structural risks, inequalities, and environmental damage inherited from nearly five centuries of extraction.