in 1545 they discovered the next-best thing: a mountain made of solid silver. The Cerro Rico at Potosí is located in the Andes in what is now southern Bolivia at an altitude of 4,000 meters, a two-and-a-half-month journey via pack animal from Lima. It contained so much high-grade silver ore that it provided about 80 percent of the silver mined across the world over the next 250 years.[37]
