Departamento de Potosí, Bolivia — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Departamento de Potosí known for?

The department takes its name and its fame from the city of Potosí, founded in 1545 as a mining town whose ore once flowed through the Spanish empire. At its heart stands the National Mint of Bolivia, where that silver was struck into coin. The department reads as one of the highest, most storied corners of Bolivia, a place where the colonial wealth of the Andes was dug, minted, and shipped out.

Where is Departamento de Potosí?

Potosí rides high. One of the loftiest departments of Bolivia, it is a broad block of Andean highland covering well over a hundred thousand square kilometres of open puna, salt flats, and mineral-rich sierra strung across the cold cordillera. The city of Potosí sits at its core, wrapped around the great ore mountain that made it.

From that centre the department spreads out toward the borders it shares with the other departments of Bolivia, among them Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz. Water is scarce. The terrain is unforgiving, so settlement clings to the valleys and the mining seams rather than to any fertile plain, and the whole department carries the stamp of the silver that was pulled from its rock.

What is Departamento de Potosí like?

Potosí's culture is bound to mining and to the high Andes. The department grew around the ore of its namesake city, and the memory of the silver years shapes its festivals, its churches, and its sense of itself. Colonial religion left a mark.

The city of Potosí filled with churches and civic buildings on the wealth of the mines, and San Lorenzo among them still carries the carved stonework of that age. Against that colonial inheritance runs an older highland world, the life of the puna communities who work the thin soils and herd across the cold uplands of the department. Both belong to Potosí.

The National Mint of Bolivia stands as the emblem of the minted, exported wealth, while the surrounding highland keeps the slower rhythms of a people long settled at altitude, and the department reads as the join between imperial silver and enduring Andean life.

What is the history of Departamento de Potosí?

Potosí's history is the history of silver. The city that gives the department its name was founded in 1545 beside a mountain of ore, and it became one of the great mining centres of the Spanish empire, its wealth carried across oceans. The National Mint of Bolivia was raised to strike that metal into coin.

From this single seam of rock a colonial economy grew, faded, and left behind the churches and mansions of the old city, and the whole department still carries the weight of that mining past.

What is the climate of Departamento de Potosí?

Cold and thin. Potosí has a harsh high-altitude climate ruled by its position across the Bolivian cordillera, where the extreme height overrides any warmth its place in the tropics might suggest. Days can be bright and sharp, nights bitterly cold, and the air stays dry across much of the year.

Seasons split into a wetter warm spell and a long dry stretch, and frost is common on the open highland of the department around the city of Potosí.

How do you get to Departamento de Potosí?

Potosí is reached through its namesake city, the department's road hub. The city of Potosí gathers the main highways that cross the highland, and most travel into the department passes through it. Roads run high and slow here.

The altitude and the broken cordillera make overland journeys long, and routes toward neighbouring departments of Bolivia follow the passes rather than any direct line.