CASA DE LA MONEDA

This is the largest colonial building constructed by the Spanish 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 inner courtyard: El Mascarón. This piece was created by a Frenchman, Eugène 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 founding of the imperial city (1575). Coinage was regulated by the Catholic kings of Spain. Strict control was imposed, given the role that silver (metal) was to play as the 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 silver automatically increased Spain's wealth. Crown control stipulated that a quarter of ingot production had to be used for minting coins. Today's Casa de la Moneda, whose construction began in 1750 and was completed 30 years later, covers an area of 12,500 m². Investment cost: 1,142,000 pesos. Return on investment: unlimited. The very first world currencies were minted here.

The Casa de la Moneda was built on a former marketplace. Materials were brought in from Potosí, the windows from Cochabamba and the balconies from Salamanca via Buenos Aires. The door was carved by anonymous Indian artists. The imposing building is divided into three inner courtyards corresponding, in order, to the administrative part, the coining machines and the metal melting rooms.

Numismatics room: numismatics, the science of ancient coins and medals, has a special place here. From the ^16th to the ^19th century, Macuquinas, a word of Quechua origin meaning "struck", were minted here. These coins were made one by one, by hammer, until 1773. These macuquinas circulated in America and Spain with the same monetary value.

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

Melchor Pérez de Holguín Room (the one featured on the 50 Bs banknotes): 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 for most of his life. His painting expresses the culture shock of the Spanish conquest and bears witness to the economic and cultural boom of a city that had the luxury of its own school of painting. Holguín's work is populated by figures from biblical and Christian history, pale and lean ascetics and mystics with clean-cut features, saints, angels, prophets and martyrs. But behind this concentration lie forests of symbols that watch us with familiar eyes. In a Baudelairean manner, the painter establishes correspondences between the forces of nature, the Andean gods and human beings, the latter often under-dimensioned in relation to the other elements of the work.

Holguín is said to have drawn like an Indian, yet painted like a Spaniard. He has often been likened to the Spanish painter Miguel de Zurbaran, to whom his texture, the features of his figures and his mastery of chiaroscuro bring him closer. While Holguin reached the apogee of his art, 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 globe reached its apogee through painters who had in common to sketch the portrait of a new cultural entity in the making: Latin America. According to specialists, Holguín's best painting is The Entry of Viceroy Morcillo into Potosí (1716), now in the Museo de las Américas 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.

Salle Gaspar Miguel de Berrio: curiously, his most significant painting is not to be found here. Exhibited at the Museo Universitario de Sucre, it depicts the imperial city and the San Idelfonso lagoons, with the cerro Rico, the silver mountain, dominating the ensemble. A Creole descendant of Spaniards, Miguel de Berrio was born in Potosí in 1706 and died around 1765. His finest paintings(The Coronation of the Virgin) can be found in the La Paz Art Museum, and are not to be missed. His style, a synthesis of ^18th-century regional painting, lies between the Collao and Cuzco schools. It is characterized by the absence of perspective, the idealization of subjects and the accumulation of figures and symbols that require a certain iconographic knowledge to read.

Salle Luis Nino: painter and sculptor of the Potosí school, his finest work, The Virgin of Malaga, is in the Denver Museum, USA. La Moneda exhibits two other virgins by Nino, the Virgen del Rosario and the Virgen de Sabaya. This bohemian of immense talent, who loved booze, girls and partying, was hired by the archdiocese to create religious works for churches. His Virgins include the Andean Trinity, the Pachamama (a triangular-shaped virgin), the Sun and the Moon, alongside angels and archangels playing the charango. His dominant hues are gold, red and blue. He may have created some of San Lorenzo's sculptures.

La Vierge del Cerro: the visit to the painting collections ends with an anonymous ^18th-century painting: La Vierge de la Montagne de Potosí. 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, bottom left, chats with Huallpa. Centeno was the first Spaniard to exploit the silver mountain. At bottom 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 from Potosí, will be able to complete the building of a certain St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. At the very top, the artist has placed God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, not forgetting the sun to the right and the moon to the left of the Pachamama. In a way, this painting is the "synthesis of syntheses" of Potosí art and history.

Silver Room: this gives a tiny glimpse of how great Potosí once was. Here you can see silver utensils, candelabras and even festive costumes, as well as the machines used to mint coins.

Cecilio Guzman de Rojas room (the man who appears on the 10 Bs banknotes): in his painting The Kiss of the Idol, Guzman de Rojas expresses in his own way the omnipresence of Andean divinities in Bolivian society.

A mineralogy room will delight geologists and lithotherapy enthusiasts, who will discover no fewer than 3,600 pieces, including the famous bolivianita, the only one of its kind in the world.

An archaeology room features pre-Columbian relics, textiles, chullpas and the mummies of Spanish children once buried in front of the San Bernardo church.