The Spanish Empire built its extraction system on an Inca foundation. In 1574, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reintroduced the mita, a system of rotational forced labor that the Inca had used for public works, and turned it toward the silver mines. Under the colonial mita, indigenous men from communities across the Andes were conscripted for months of underground labor. They descended into tunnels where they worked by candlelight, carrying ore on their backs up ladders that could stretch hundreds of feet. The Spanish Crown preferred indigenous labor to enslaved African workers in the mines, citing the high mortality and low productivity rates of the latter in high-altitude conditions. The first decades of extraction were straightforward: the mountain held vast deposits of pure silver and silver chloride near the surface. By 1565, those high-grade ores were exhausted.

When the easy silver ran out, a new technology arrived: the patio process, which used mercury to extract silver from lower-grade ores. It was effective and devastating. Mercury poisoning became endemic among the workers, attacking their nervous systems, kidneys, and lungs. Combined with silicosis from inhaling rock dust, collapsing tunnels, and the sheer physical toll of working at altitudes above 4,000 meters, the mines consumed human lives at a rate that horrified even some colonial-era observers. The mountain earned its name, la montana que come hombres, the mountain that eats men. The exact death toll remains contested among historians. Some sources cite a figure of eight million deaths, though scholars like Peter Bakewell, Enrique Tandeter, and Raquel Gil Montero argue that number likely represents total deaths across the entire Viceroyalty of Peru, not Potosi alone. What is beyond dispute is that hundreds of thousands of people, indigenous conscripts, enslaved workers, and free laborers called mingas who stayed on after their mita service, died in and around these mines.

Five centuries of mining have reshaped the mountain itself. Spanish-era extraction removed the original summit through mountaintop mining, giving Cerro Rico its current conical profile, which dates to the 17th century. The interior is honeycombed with tunnels, some dating back centuries, intersecting and collapsing into one another. In 2011, a sinkhole opened at the summit, serious enough that it had to be filled with ultra-light cement. The peak continues to sink by several centimeters each year. In 2014, UNESCO placed Cerro Rico and Potosi on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites, citing uncontrolled mining operations that risk degrading the site. The mountain still employs roughly 15,000 miners, many of them working in cooperatives with limited safety equipment. Miners today contract silicosis at alarming rates and have a life expectancy of around 40 years.

Cerro Rico's silver did not just enrich Spain. It reshaped global trade, flowing through Manila galleons to China and fueling the first truly worldwide economy. The city of Potosi, built on extraction wealth, filled with baroque churches and colonial mansions. San Luis Potosi in Mexico was named after the mountain, a tribute to the riches other colonial towns hoped to replicate. According to tradition, Simon Bolivar waved a flag from the summit during the independence struggles, and the mountain was incorporated into Bolivia's coat of arms. Today, the cooperative miners who work Cerro Rico occupy a complex position in Bolivian society, powerful enough politically to have helped elect President Evo Morales in 2006, yet trapped in dangerous work with few alternatives. As one former miner told a reporter: "You have to be crazy to work in the mines, with the conditions. But there are no other alternatives."