Despite losing hundreds of feet, “the mountain that eats men,” as it became known, still looms over Potosí – which now ranks as one of the most polluted places on earth. LEGEND has it, more than 400 years ago in a sparsely populated region of what is now southern Bolivia, Diego Huallpa, a young Quechua man, lit a fire at the base of a mountain to ward off the bitter cold. When he awoke the next morning, a trickle of molten silver had bubbled out of the ground beneath his fire. He tried – and failed – to keep his discovery from the Spanish conquistadors. In 1545, they claimed the mountain, christened it Cerro Rico (“Rich Hill”), and built the town of Potosí at its foot. Within 50 years, Cerro Rico had become the most productive silver mine in the world, and Potosí one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Spanish empire. Over two centuries, miners removed 45,000 tons of silver from the mountain – 200 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty, and about 5 percent of all the silver in existence today. Most of it was stamped into Spanish dollars, or “pieces of eight,” which …