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Bolivia: The eyes of condor
14February

Bolivia: The eyes of condor

SILVER TRANSPORTED TO SPAIN IN JUST OVER  A CENTURY AND A HALF, EXCEEDED THREE TIMES THE TOTAL OF THE EUROPEAN RESERVES.


"To take the silver out of America arrived at Potosí captains and ascetics, the knights fighting and the apostles, soldiers and monks. Converted into cones and ingots, the viscera of the rich hill substantially fueled the development of Europe. "It worths a Peru” was the highest praise to persons or things from the moment Pizarro became the owner of the Cuzco, but since the discovery of the hill, Don Quijote de la Mancha talks with other words:" It worths a Potosi "he warns Sancho (...) ".


"America was, by that time, a vast centered pithead mainly in Potosi. Some Bolivian writers, full with excessive enthusiasm, say that in three centuries Spain received enough metal from Potosi to build a silver bridge from the hilltop to the door of the royal palace across the ocean. The image is undoubtedly, work of fantasy, but either way alludes to a reality that, in fact, seems invented: the flow of silver reached gigantic proportions. "


"Between 1503 and 1660, 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver arrived at the port of Seville. Silver transported to Spain in just over a century and a half, exceeded three times the total European reserves. And these small figures do not include smuggling (...). "


" Jugular vein of Viceroyalty, Silver Spring of America, Potosi had 120,000 inhabitants according to the census carried out in1573. Only twenty eight years had passed since the city sprouted between the Andean highlands and already had, as if by magic, the same population as London and more inhabitants than Sevilla, Madrid, Rome or Paris. By 1650, a new census adjudged to Potosi 160 000 inhabitants. It was one of the largest and richest cities in the world, ten times more populated than Boston, at a time when New York had not even that name (...) ".