Main Plaza, Potosí

Potosí, BOL

The central plaza of Potosí was the outcome of town planning by Spaniards, but in the 16th-18th centuries, it would have been filled with indigenous, African and Creole residents of the city—some passing through, others resting, yet others selling goods.

Founded in the mid-16th century, Potosí became one of the largest cities in Spanish America and the early modern world. In the 1980s, Potosí was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is the same plaza shown in the painting by Melchor Pérez Holguin of Viceroy Morcillo parading into Potosí, also in Vistas. The Cerro Rico, seen in that painting as well, remains a prominent feature of the local landscape, visible from most places in town.

The central part of Potosí was ordered by a traza, or grid plan with a central plaza. In this, the city shared its basic form with many laid out under the guidance of the Spanish crown. As was also typical, important buildings stood near, or opened onto the main plaza. In the late 17th century, for instance, the Royal Mint (Casa de la Moneda) was enlarged and rebuilt right off Potosí’s main square.

By 1550, Potosí was a boom town of merchants, miners, priests, prostitutes, African slaves and native Andeans. By the early 1600s, the town had over 160,000 residents, although this population would fall to 60,000 in the next century. If the town’s fortunes waxed and waned with the flows of silver mined from Cerro Rico, the plaza remained a crucial part of Potosí’s civic and economic identity. Across the colonial period, this plaza bustled with activity—not only on special occasions, when religious holidays or the arrival of viceroy were celebrated with processions and theatrical performances, but every day, when merchants plied their wares and people gathered to gossip.

Barbara E. Mundy

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Bakewell, Peter J. 1988. Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Potosí: catalogación de su patrimonio urbano y arquitectónico. 1990. La Paz: Instituto Boliviano de Cultura.

Querejazu, Pedro and Elizabeth Ferrer, eds. 1997. Potosí: Colonial Treasures and the Bolivian City of Silver. New York: Americas Society.

Villa Rodríguez, José, ed. 2000. Potosí: plata para Europa. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla/Fundacíon El Monte.