Vale un Potosi

Potosi is the worlds highest city at a wopping 4090m above sea level. My ears where popping like mad on the way up in the bus I can tell you!
History time. In brief it goes like this; a local dude (peruvian indian) in about the early 1500's, stumbled across precious minerals at the base of a mountain called Cerro Rico after lighting a fire to keep warm. The spanish conquerors got wind of it and then started three centries of mining. The spaniards forced the Aficans and Indian slaves to do all the dirty work of course, mining the silver. Its estimated that between 1545 to 1825 as many as eight million slaves died in the appauling mining conditions. For the miners Silicosis pneumonia was the main cause of death with a life expectancy of 10 years, thats if you did'nt die in an accident first. If you did'nt work in the mines you worked the silver smelting process and died of Mercury exposer. In the eighteenth century Potosi became the largest and richest city in the whole of latin America overnight. Even today anything lucrative is said to vale un Potosi (to be worth a Potosi).
So mining still continues today and naturally theirs a tour so I´m off to check it out and expose myself to some spicey gases! (not those gases).