Bolivia’s Mountain of Silver Stands on the Edge of Collapse

At 15,600 feet above sea level, Potosí’s Cerro Rico—the “Rich Hill” that once financed empires—still glints with promise, but every sparkle hides a fracture. Beneath the red slopes of Bolivia’s most iconic mountain, generations of miners keep digging even as the mountain’s summit begins to cave in. What was once the beating heart of global silver wealth is now a trembling relic, hollowed by centuries of greed and still asked to deliver.

A mountain that built an empire—and broke itself

The mountain’s outline is unmistakable, though no longer whole. What used to be a sharp, proud cone is now visibly shaved down. Since colonial times, mining has cut Cerro Rico’s height by roughly 250 meters. Engineers say the crown could fall another 20 before nature—or gravity—forces a reckoning.

“It will probably collapse another 10 or 20 meters; it will end up as a truncated cone,” said mining engineer Freddy Llanos of Tomás Frías Autonomous University, speaking to Mongabay. It’s a quiet prophecy, but one that weighs as heavily as the ore once hauled down these slopes.

Cerro Rico’s silver once bankrolled the Spanish Empire, paid for Europe’s wars, and flooded the world’s markets with currency. Yet Potosí itself remains among Bolivia’s poorest regions. “People came to Potosí, got rich, and left,” geologist Hernán Ríos Montero told Mongabay, noting that capital—like the mountain’s ore—was always extracted, never reinvested.

UNESCO sounded the alarm in 2014, adding Cerro Rico to its list of endangered heritage sites after “continued and uncontrolled mining operations” began eroding the peak. The warning hasn’t slowed the drills. For many in Potosí, the mountain is less a monument than a last paycheck.

Families living on the fault line

The danger is no longer theoretical. About 180 families still live directly on Cerro Rico’s slopes, and around 10,000 miners—most of them Quechua—work its tunnels, according to local data cited by Mongabay. Every tremor carries risk. “All the houses are cracked because everything is sinking,” said Silvia Mamani Armijo, 34, who lives on the mountain with her children and guards the entrance to a mine. “During the rainy season, this whole area can collapse… so many families could die.“

Cave-ins are common enough to blur into routine. “There are more and more every year,” miner Basilio Vargas told Mongabay. He began working at eleven; later, he watched the ground swallow the home where he grew up. Police records count 96 mining deaths in Potosí this year, at least 90 inside Cerro Rico, though many go unreported.

Women stand on the front lines, too. The guardabocaminas, or mine-mouth sentinels, keep watch with little more than sticks and dogs—and sometimes dynamite. Lucía Mamani, 51, said she earns between $72 and $145 a month, barely a third of Bolivia’s minimum wage. “It’s not nice living on the mountain,” she told Mongabay. “During the rainy season, you have to be worried that any part of the mountain could collapse.“

Water arrives in barrels, often contaminated with mineral dust. Children fall ill with diarrhea. The air itself tastes metallic. Advocates like Paulina Ibeth Garabito Ovando of MUSOL warn that sexual violence, wage theft, and forced labor haunt the shadows of these tunnels, turning survival into a daily negotiation.

The new hunger: faster drills, thinner veins

What silver once flowed like rivers now drips like sweat. The richest seams are gone; what remains must be pried out in bulk and sold cheaply. Miners now dig for low-grade zinc, lead, tin, and silver, sending their finds to the Manquiri Mining Company for refining. The shift from hand tools to pneumatic drills has made the work faster—and deadlier. “Each vibration is like an earthquake inside the mountain,” one miner explained.

Global demand has become another invisible pickaxe. Silver prices have soared thanks to solar energy, while zinc feeds the wind industry. “While we bear the brunt of plunder and exploitation, it’s other countries who are talking about a transition,” said Alfredo Zaconeta, a researcher with the Bolivian think tank CEDLA, in remarks to Mongabay. “Collapses even help cooperatives—like dynamite—they make the rock easier to collect.“

Even counting, the workforce has turned political. Bolivia’s state-owned mining company, COMIBOL, claims 30,000 miners toil here; local journalists put the number closer to 10,000. They say inflation helps justify government spending and mining concessions. But every new pair of hands means more pressure on the ground already hollowed to dust. “The wealth from Cerro Rico generated the globalization of the world economy,” Llanos told Mongabay. “It should be a moral and material obligation to give back even 0.00001% of that to save it.“

A race to save a wounded symbol

In 2022, a Bolivian court ordered COMIBOL to shut all mine entrances above 4,400 meters to ease the stress on the summit. Enforcement has been slow; cooperatives argue that’s where the best ore remains. This September, another court froze the personal accounts of senior mining officials to force compliance.

Last month, COMIBOL and the cooperative federation FEDECOMIN announced new restrictions—daytime hours only, no heavy machinery above 4,400 meters—and claimed that “more than 60%” of portal relocations had been completed, closing 20 entrances with 10 to go, according to Mongabay. FEDECOMIN’s leader said miners might accept concessions elsewhere if given equivalent ground. Whether anyone trusts that promise is another matter.

Engineer Llanos and his team have drafted a stabilization plan: wrap the summit with concrete and steel to seal dangerous shafts and reinforce the crown. The cost—about $3.5 million—seems almost symbolic compared to the billions Cerro Rico once generated. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty,” said Zaconeta, noting that real progress demands money and political will.

For Potosí’s elders, the damage is personal. “Puntita era pues—it used to have a sharp peak,” said Petrona Santos Mamani, 82, who once broke stones by hand as a palliri. “It’s a symbol of Bolivia, and now it’s broken… It hurts to see the Cerro like this.“

She remembers marching with hundreds of women to demand safer conditions years ago. Now she talks of marching again, not for wages, but to defend what’s left. Each day, the slope grows softer, the silhouette rounder. The world took silver and left emptiness.

Also Read: Colombian Farmers Trade Coca for Dignity, Coffee, and a Future That Lasts

What remains is a question whispered between the cracks: will anyone give back before the mountain finally gives way?