CASA DE LA MONEDA

It is the largest colonial building built by the Spaniards in the Americas. This museum, the most beautiful in the country, impresses as soon as you see its carved portal. A figure dominates the first interior courtyard: El Mascarón. This piece was created by a Frenchman, Eugene Moullon, in 1856. Its identity intrigues historians, but it is known that it is not a representation of Bacchus. El Mascarón is the symbol of the imperial city.

The first Casa de la Moneda was built just 30 years after the foundation of the imperial city (1575). The minting of coins was regulated by the Catholic Kings of Spain. Strict control was imposed because of the role that silver (metal) was to play as a standard of money supply at the time. A little economics, just to remind you that the standard of the monetary system was both monetary base (store of value) and money supply (unit of account, unit of value and unit of exchange). Any physical production of money automatically increased the wealth of Spain. The control by the crown stipulated that a quarter of the production of bullion had to be used for minting coins. The current Casa de la Moneda, whose construction began in 1750 and was completed 30 years later, occupies an area of 12,500 m². Investment cost: 1,142,000 pesos. Return on investment: unlimited. It was within its walls that the very first world currencies were minted.

The Casa de la Moneda was built on an old market place. The materials were brought from the vicinity of Potosi, the windows from Cochabamba and the balconies from Salamanca via Buenos Aires. The door was carved by anonymous Indian artists. Imposing, the whole building is divided into three inner courtyards that correspond, in order, to the administrative part, the coining machines and the metal casting rooms.

Thenumismatic room: numismatics, the science of coins and ancient medals, is obviously very important here. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century Macuquinas were minted here, a word of Quechua origin meaning... "minted". These coins were made one by one, with a hammer, until 1773. These macuquinas circulated in America and Spain with the same monetary value.

Room of the rolling mills: the wooden machines were made in Spain in the 18th century and brought to Potosi from Buenos Aires. They were used to roll gold and silver ingots and functioned like clocks. The axes and gears are made of holm oak, one of the most resistant woods in Europe. It has always been thought that at some time these machines were operated by black slaves, but there is no documentation to support this hypothesis.

Melchor Pérez de Holguín Room (the one that appears on the 50 Bs bills): this is one of the most complete collections of colonial painting. Melchor Pérez, born in 1660 in Cochabamba, died at the age of 68 in Potosí, where he lived almost all his life. His painting expresses the cultural shock of the Spanish conquest and testifies to the economic and cultural development of a city that had the luxury of having its own school of painting. Holguin's work is populated with characters from biblical and Christian history, ascetics and mystics, pale and thin with clean lines, saints, angels, prophets and martyrs. But behind this concentration are hidden forests of symbols that observe us with familiar eyes. In a Baudelairian way, the painter establishes correspondences between the forces of nature, the Andean gods and men, the latter often being under-dimensioned compared to the other elements of the work.

It is said that Holguín drew like an Indian, while painting like a Spaniard. He has often been compared to the Spanish painter Miguel de Zurbaran, to whom his texture, the features of his characters and his mastery of chiaroscuro bring him closer. While Holguin reached the peak of his art, at the same time, further north, Arze y Ceballos (Ecuador), Quispe Tito (Peru) and Echave Rioja (Mexico) brought Latin American colonial painting to its peak. Between 1650 and 1750, the pictorial expression of this part of the world reached its peak through painters who had in common to sketch the portrait of a new cultural entity being born: Latin America. According to specialists, Holguín's best painting is The Entry of Viceroy Morcillo into Potosi (1716), which is in the Museum of the Americas in Madrid. Nevertheless, the collection at La Moneda is rich enough to give you an idea of the work of the most representative painter of the Potosina school.

Room Gaspar Miguel de Berrio: curiously, his most significant painting is not here. On display at the University Museum of Sucre, it depicts the imperial city and the lagoons of San Idelfonso, with the Cerro Rico, the silver mountain, dominating the ensemble. Miguel de Berrio, a Creole descendant of Spaniards, was born in Potosí in 1706 and died around 1765. His most beautiful paintings(The Coronation of the Virgin) are in the La Paz Art Museum, which is not to be missed. His style, a synthesis of the regional painting of the XVIIIth century, is situated between the school of Collao and that of Cuzco. It is characterized by the absence of perspective, the idealization of the subjects and the accumulation of figures and symbols that require a certain iconographic knowledge to read.

Luis Nino Hall: painter and sculptor of the Potosi school, his most beautiful work, The Virgin of Malaga, is in the Denver Museum in the United States. La Moneda exhibits two other virgins by Nino, the Virgen del Rosario and the Virgen de Sabaya. This bohemian of immense talent, who loved alcohol, girls and partying, was hired by the archdiocese to create religious works for the churches. He introduced among his Virgins the Andean Trinity, the Pachamama (a triangular-shaped virgin), the Sun and the Moon, alongside angels and archangels playing the charango. His dominant colors are gold, red and blue. He could have made some of the sculptures of San Lorenzo.

The Virgin of the Hill: The visit to the painting collections ends with an anonymous painting from the 18th century: The Virgin of the Mountain of Potosi. Featuring the Silver Mountain, the Virgin Mary and the Pachamama, it illustrates the extraordinary history of the imperial city. At the bottom of the painting is Huaskar Capác, the Inca emperor who wanted to exploit the silver, and to whom the mountain responded brutally with an explosion (Poto'jsi in Quechua). To his right stands Diego Huallpa, holder of the secret of the silver mountain. Diego Centeno, at the bottom left of the picture, is talking with Huallpa. Centeno was the first Spaniard to exploit the silver mountain. Below and to the right stands Emperor Charles V, builder of the empire where the sun never sets, symbolized by a blue sphere. To his left, the Pope and a bishop, religious authorities who, thanks to the tithe of Potosi, will be able to complete the building of a certain Basilica of St. Peter, in Rome. At the top, the artist placed God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, without forgetting the sun on the right and the moon on the left of the Pachamama. This painting is in a way "the synthesis of syntheses" of the art and history of Potosi.

Silver Room: it gives a small glimpse of what the greatness of Potosi was. We can see utensils, candelabras and even festive costumes made of silver, as well as the machines used to mint coins.

Cecilio Guzman de Rojas Room (the one that appears on the 10 Bs bills): in his painting The Kiss of the Idol, Guzman de Rojas expresses in his own way the omnipresence of Andean deities in Bolivian society.

A room of mineralogy will make the happiness of our friends the geologists and lovers of lithotherapy, who will discover not less than 3 600 pieces, of which the famous bolivianita, unique in the world.

An archaeological room presents pre-Columbian vestiges, textiles, as well as chullpas and mummies of Spanish children formerly buried in front of the church of San Bernardo.