00:00In 1545, a man got lost looking for his llama in the Andes. He lit a fire and fell asleep.
00:07When he woke up, a vein of silver had melted out of the rocks beneath him.
00:12That was the discovery of Cerro Rico, the rich mountain. The Spanish came running.
00:18They built a city at its feet. Within decades, it was bigger than London.
00:24Bigger than Paris. Every war Spain fought was paid for with silver from this single mountain.
00:30Every coin, every galleon, every empire, built on the backs of men who went in and never came out.
00:36For 500 years, this mountain has been devouring people.
00:41Between 2 and 8 million men have died inside it.
00:44Today it's been hollowed out more than 20 stories deep.
00:48It's collapsing in on itself. But they're still digging.
00:52300 men die here every year. The average miner lives to 40.
00:58Right now, as you're listening to this, tens of thousands of men are crawling through tunnels
01:031,150 meters below ground. Headlamps on. Bending double. Digging deeper.
01:11Before every shift, many of them stop. They pour a
01:16drink in front of a red statue with long horns. They call him LTO, the uncle.
01:22There's an old saying among the miners, above ground, God rules.
01:27Below ground, LTO rules.
01:3118,000 tons of silver came out of this mountain between the 16th and 18th centuries.
01:36At one point, the richest ore was literally 40% pure silver.
01:41In 1656, a Spanish priest wrote, the silver stolen from this mountain could build a bridge from Bolivia all the
01:48way to Madrid.
01:49Someone later added, and the bones of the men who died inside it could build another one back.
01:55But it wasn't just the dust that killed them.
01:58Silver mining on an industrial scale required mercury, the deadliest substance in the colonial world.
02:04They'd crush the ore, mix it with liquid mercury, and the silver would separate out.
02:09But mercury is poison.
02:11The men who handled it lost their minds.
02:15Tremors.
02:17Hallucinations.
02:18Teeth falling out.
02:20And that mercury came from another mountain, Huancabelica in Peru.
02:24The locals called it the, Mountain of Death.
02:27So to feed one cannibal mountain, they opened a second.
02:311.
02:32The silver minted here became the first truly global currency,
02:36Rios de Ocho, Spanish dollars that fueled trade from Europe to China.
02:40A single mountain rewrote the entire world's economy.
02:44You might think this is ancient history.
02:47But in 2015, silver prices rocketed to near all-time highs.
02:52Why?
02:53Because solar panels need silver.
02:56Wind turbines need silver.
02:58The green energy revolution you hear so much about is driving men back into this dying mountain right now.
03:04The government says 30,000 people are working inside.
03:08Local journalists say maybe 10,000.
03:11Either way, the number is going up.
03:14An engineer designed a fix, pours steel-reinforced concrete over the summit to stop the collapse.
03:20Budget, $3.5 million.
03:24A rounding error compared to the wealth this mountain has produced.
03:28It was never funded.
03:30500 years.
03:32The mountain keeps collapsing.
03:34The men keep digging.
03:36The one thing that hasn't changed, the silver these men dig out has never, ever stayed in the hands of
03:41the men who dig it.
03:42The only question that remains, what runs out first, the silver, or the mountain?
03:49The silver here.
