Potosí
— — the mountain that paid for an empire.
Not only on a wall.
“Potosí sits at roughly 4,000 metres in the southern Bolivian Andes, in the shadow of Cerro Rico — the cone of red rock that produced most of the silver funding the Spanish empire between 1545 and the eighteenth century. The colonial centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, holds the old royal mint and a tier of baroque churches built from the same wealth, walking distance from the mountain whose veins are worked to this day.
Potosí, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Potosí is the capital of the Potosí Department in southern Bolivia, set at about 4,067 metres above sea level on the eastern flank of the Andes — one of the highest cities of meaningful size anywhere in the world. The colonial core sits beneath Cerro Rico, the iron-stained cone that gave the city its purpose. The current population is roughly 250,000. Sucre, Bolivia's constitutional capital, lies 160 kilometres to the northeast; La Paz is about 540 kilometres north. The historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987.
Cerro Rico was identified as silver-bearing in 1545 and within a generation Potosí had grown into one of the largest cities in the Americas, with a population estimated above 150,000 by 1610. The Casa Nacional de Moneda, the royal mint completed in 1773, struck the silver eight-real coins that circulated worldwide. Many of the colonial churches — San Lorenzo de Carangas with its mestizo-baroque portal, the Cathedral on Plaza 10 de Noviembre, the Compañía de Jesús — are built of stone quarried within sight of the mountain that paid for them.
The thin air sits with you in Potosí. At 4,067 metres, atmospheric pressure is about 60 percent of sea level; visitors arriving from low altitudes generally need a day or two to acclimatise. The dry season runs May through October, with cold nights and bright, mild afternoons; January and February bring rain and the chance of snow on Cerro Rico. The mountain itself rises another 700 metres above the town, capped at 4,782 metres. Coca tea, sold on most corners, is the local remedy for the climb.