‘Not recommended for the fainthearted!’ the tour leaflet quipped, the usual dramatic blurb to convince ‘seen-it-all’ travellers to dip into well-worn money-belts. So here we were, fitted out with filthy macs, wellies, hardhats, battery packs and a handful of coca leaves; a motley group of foreigners impatient to experience the world’s largest underground mine complex in Potosi, Bolivia. 

“How old am I? How old? Go guess!” Juan, our guide, was insistent. Feeling obliged, and taking into account his greyish pallor and sunken eyes, we offered safe estimates of 45, 48 maybe?

“I’m 25!” he laughed, seemingly proud to have outwitted us all. God! Only one year older than me then. To look like that. It was the first of many confronting aspects of Bolivia’s heavy metal mining world.

As we bumped our way in a minibus to a mine entrance over 4000 metres high on the infamous Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), the word ‘scarring’ had never seemed so appropriate. The pink coloured mountain, hovering over the colonial city of Potosi, is like a body donated to science, repeatedly hacked at by hordes of incompetent medical students. The land containing the coveted hordes of silver has been cut open, probed and bled for over 500 years.

Although hard to believe now, Potosi was one of the world’s largest and most affluent cities in the 16th Century, brimming with fabulous architecture, gambling halls and theatres, rivaling London and Paris. Such wealth and boom years were fed by the world’s biggest source of silver lurking within Cerro Rico. At one time there were as many as 615 registered mines and predictably the Spanish colonial rulers filled their boots well. Then Mexico discovered silver sources to rival Bolivia’s in the late 1600’ s and, as Potosi silver became more expensive to extract, the boom was reduced to a quiet thud. Typhoid brought the city completely to its knees and Potosi, aside from being the world’s highest city, lost its worldly status. 

We walked in single file behind Juan into a dark, wood scaffold-clad orifice to the underworld. Before long one of the group was led back out, scared and struggling to breathe, and I’m sure that the five of us left had considered what it might feel like to be buried alive as many once were. Our headlamps illuminated the puddly ground, the sagging cables overhead and the haze of airborne particles. The tour was a cross between seeing the seven dwarves at work and entering Lucifer’s Lair. We were wordless as we spied on little glinty-eyed, hunched miners sweating their way through the hellish tunnels, they and their carts rumbling to some unknown destination in the earth’s intestines. Their ragged clothes barely clung to their glistening bodies, their cheeks bulged with huge wads of coca leaves and their expressions, for the most part, were vacant.

“Everyone off track! Keep back!” Juan suddenly roared, and with seconds to spare, a laden truck was heaved past, the noise entirely filling the small space in which we were huddling. This wasn’t a mine full of subtly distributed wax figures in costume and painted expressions. Not only utterly real, this was a livelihood that had missed out on any modernisation policies for several hundred years. We were inside a Bolivian mountain witnessing a living time warp.

A grotto housing ‘El Tio’, god of the mine, was awash with the daily offerings of alcohol, cigarettes and most importantly, coca leaves, the only substance that can make life underground remotely bearable. The underground deity has the ‘power’ to preserve or take life within his nightmarish realm, but judging by his inane grin and erect penis, thankfully, he seemed happy that day.

As we descended down one of the mountain’s arteries, muffled explosions like cinema surround sound pulsed through the riddled mountain flesh. I pulled my headscarf tighter around my nose and mouth. The 40-degree heat was loaded with poisonous chemicals, explaining why the average male life expectancy in Potosi is 43, with the ‘mal de mina’ - silicosis - progressively eating away at lungs and taking a fatal hold within 10 to 15 years. This explained Juan’s appearance. He had been a miner in Cerro Rico since he was 16.

We crawled along to a hot pocket in the earth where we perched on our haunches to listen to Juan. He informed us of the hundreds of children straining their young muscles down there, some as young as 6, age laws irrelevant. Wheezily, he went on to tell of the eight million Incan and African slaves who had died within the labyrinth’s appalling conditions. 

But it’s not all desperation. The miners now work for cooperatives and not government mines, or as slaves, he told us in the torchlight. This way, any silver they find, they keep, minus the membership fee, and they choose their hours. The miners can earn double the average wage in Bolivia, with the possible chance of mega bucks if they gauge into an ore rich vein, not to mention the tourist guiding jobs. Incredibly, after 500 years of mining, only 40% of the silver has been extracted. It seems that many more men will gamble their lungs yet.

Breathless, with the metallic taste in our mouths and yes, a little faint of heart after all, we descended yet further into the dusty, dirty, dark shafts. Our group crowded into alcoves where dark men, often a feeble flame on their helmets their only illumination, squinted at us, glad for a change from the monotonous rock face. They were happier still to accept the fizzy drinks we’d brought for them. The miners crouched like animals in the gloom, their lungs full of cyanide, asbestos and death, yet eternally optimistic about what their protracted rape of the mountain might produce.

Heading back out into the 21st Century was not an easy task much of it done on all fours or even half climbing, half slithering uphill on our bellies - our hardhats cracking dully against the low, roughly hewn ceilings. After four hours underground, we emerged, blinking, into the cold air outside as grimier but wiser tourists than the ones who went in.

For once the hype had been right.