By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Potosí boasted thirty-six magnificently decorated churches and imported the finest luxury goods from all over the world. Its wealth was legendary: the streets to the cathedral were said to have been resurfaced with silver bars. But this wealth arose from the wholesale exploitation of the indigenous people forcibly seized from across Inca territory and used as slave labor for mining the silver.
How wealthy one is is how poor the other one is
