Cerro Rico — El Tío, lord of the mine

OVERVIEW

Cerro Rico above Potosí has yielded an estimated 60,000 tons of silver. Under Spanish rule, mercury poisoning and brutal conditions killed miners in vast numbers — estimates run from hundreds of thousands to eight million across the viceroyalty — and it is known as the mountain that eats men.

HISTORY

El Tío — "the Uncle", also Tío Supay — is the lord of the underworld and protector of the mine in the religion of Bolivia's miners, above all at Cerro Rico. One explanation holds that the Spanish, to discourage the worship of the Supay, gave it a devil's horns and the miners adopted them; another that the name comes from Dios, God, in languages without a "D". Hundreds of statues of El Tío — bulging-eyed and horned — now stand in the mines.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Miners will not enter the shafts without rituals or amulets. They greet El Tío and leave coca, cigarettes and liquor on Tuesdays and Fridays, spill chicha for him at Carnival, and in August sacrifice a llama whose blood, in the version the anthropologist June Nash attended in 1970, was prayed over by a yatiri. El Tío protects those who honour him and punishes those who mock him, and is understood sometimes to take lives in collapses whatever is done. The entry records a living religious practice at the place it belongs to.

VISITING

A working mine, and a dangerous one. The statues and offerings belong to the miners who keep them — ask before photographing.