Only twenty-eight years had passed since the city sprouted out of the Andean wilderness and already, as if by magic, it had the same population as London and more than Seville, Madrid, Rome, or Paris. A new census in 1650 gave Potosí a population of 160,000. It was one of the world’s biggest and richest cities, ten times bigger than Boston—at a time when New York had not even begun to call itself by that name.
