Potosi's mountain of misery and riches: venturing deep into an ancient realm of minerals, this photojournalist documents the life and culture of tenacious miners and their legacy of sacrifice.

• Author: Ferry, Stephen

The lust for treasure that motivated the Spanish conquistadors was sated when they first cut into the Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) of Potosi in 1545. For over two hundred years, the mountain yielded more than half of the world's production of silver. This flow of wealth financed Spain's empire, influenced the course of European economic development, and bolstered Europe's trade relations with China. During the colonial period, the Cerro Rico became world-famous, the subject of chronicles, poems, and painting that celebrate its grandeur and generosity.

At the same time, the mining project in Potosi provoked one of the worst demographic disasters in history. In 1575, the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, created the mita, a forced-labor system that remained in place for 250 years. Under the mita, some three million Quechua Indians were made to work in the mines. Hundreds of thousands died there, of disease, from accidents, and at the brutal hands of their masters. Peasants fled as best they could, abandoning the land, but many were forced into reducciones, concentration areas where they could tie counted and conscripted. Although historians disagree over the size of the pre-conquest population, they concur that during the course of the mita, the native population of the Andes declined by 80 percent.

I first went to Potosi in 1991, to find traces of this great crime in the daily life of the ten thousand or so mining families still working there. These miners, who are direct descendants of the Quechua enslaved during the colonial period, successfully resisted the destruction of their culture, and over the centuries they have developed powerful symbolic ways of interacting with the Cerro Rico and with their own past. But in economic terms, the Quechua never recovered from the mita: the Department of Potosi is the poorest place in all the Americas, a place where 230 babies out of 1,000 die by the age of five. I looked at both the rich culture of the miners and their economic plight as windows onto history.

Life in Potosi has the feel of a creel myth. Men there are compelled to repeat the past, working themselves to death in the very mountain that was the tomb of their ancestors. Inside the Cerro Rico, the miners worship a devil, a rapacious deity with the clothes of a miner and the beard of a Spaniard. Several times a year, they sacrifice llamas to this being, adorning the mouth of the mine with blood, so that he will not eat them. At Carnival...