HIGHLAND COMMUNITIES OF CENTRAL PERU—TSCHOPIK 49 
PASCO DEPARTMENT 
CERRO DE;PASCO 
Although today Cerro de Pasco is the center of 
the most important and developed mining area in 
Peru, the vast mineral resources of the region 
remained undiscovered—except for sporadic work- 
ings, perhaps, in pre-Hispanic times—until the 
third decade of the 17th century. At the time 
when Potosi and Huancavelica were already 
thriving boom towns, and when the mines of Puno 
were enriching the Spanish residents of the Lake 
Titicaca region, the upland pampas of the Nudo 
de Pasco were inhabited by miserable Indian 
shepherds who wrested a meager existence from a 
bleak and hostile environment. When Vazquez 
de Espinosa passed through the Province of Chin- 
chaycocha—as this high region was then called— 
early in the 17th century en route from Hudnuco 
to Jauja, he described it in the following words: 
. . . The province is very cold, and level; it has [in it] 
a lake which is more than 10 leagues in circuit, and which 
is the source of the river running through the Jauja Valley. 
The province contains the villages of Ninacaca, Pasco y 
Pisco, Carhuamayo, and that of Los Reyes, which is the 
capital and the largest, San Juan de los Condores, San 
Pedro de Cacas, and San Miguel, all very cold... . 
The Province of Chinchaycocha is very cold, so much so 
that not a single tree grows in the whole of it, and no corn 
or wheat is raised; all they get is a root crop, shaped like 
a turnip or a loaf of bread (hogazuela), which the Indians 
call macas. This grows only in this province and it is so 
fiery that the Indians assured me that wherever it is 
planted, it leaves the ground exhausted for 30 years and 
of no use for raising crops. Although this province is so 
cold, it has a large population; the houses are all round 
like a vault; the Indians build them this way on account of 
the cold. They raise many llamas in this country and 
Spanish merino sheep; the Indians made use of their dung 
for their fires; they shut the doors tight and the smoke 
gathers up under the roof and it becomes like a sweating 
chamber. Although this is a wretched sort of life, this 
province is very rich and provides for its necessities from 
those adjoining.* [Vazquez de Espinosa, 1942, pp. 
489-490.] 
Although the pastoralism described by Vazquez 
de Espinosa has survived to the present day on the 
pampas and punas around Lake Junin, the devel- 
opment of the mining industry has greatly modi- 
fied the economy of the entire region. 
The exploitation of the mineral riches of Cerro 
de Pasco was begun by the Spaniards in 1630 
“Jt is apparent from what follows (ibid., p. 490) that the Province of 
Chinchaycoca was fed then, as is modern Cerro de Pasco, largely by the farms 
situated in the lower valleys of the east Andean slopes. 
(Romero, 1944, p. 307). Although, as is generally 
known, the Incas knew and mined copper in order 
to manufacture ornaments and implements of 
bronze, the introduction of iron tools after the 
arrival of the Spaniards reduced the importance of 
copper as a useful metal in Peru. During Colonial 
times the mines of Germany, Sweden, Spain, and 
other countries of Europe produced sufficient 
copper to supply the needs of that continent and 
to make it unprofitable to export this metal from 
Peru; hence the Conquest, which in Peru gave 
such a vigorous impetus to the exploitation of 
other minerals—particularly precious metals—re- 
sulted in a marked decrease in the importance of 
copper (El Peri en Marcha, 1941, p. 248). 
Throughout the Colonial Period, silver was the 
chief metal to be mined on a large scale, and was 
the principal source of wealth of the fabulously 
rich Peruvian Viceroyalty. Hence, although at 
the Cerro de Pasco mines vast copper deposits 
underlay superficial layers of silver-bearing ore, 
only the latter metal was exploited by the Span- 
iards (idem). The silver mines of the region 
seem never to have ranked in importance with 
those of Puno, nor with Potosi in what is today 
Bolivia; it has been said, nevertheless, that over a 
period of 250 years of exploitation, prior to the 
modern mechanized era, Cerro de Pasco alone 
produced some 40,000 tons of pure silver (Toribio 
Polo; 1911, ps il)s 
During the late 18th century, at the time when 
Spanish power in the New World was on the wane, 
there was a great drop in silver production and in 
mining generally throughout Peru. And although 
during the troubled 19th century the price of silver 
fluctuated in accordance with the trends of the 
world market, the heyday of silver mining in Peru 
was over; the great decline in the price of silver, 
initiated during the last quarter of the 18th cen- 
tury, gave the coup de grace to the ancient and now 
exhausted mines, and one after the other, all had 
to be closed (El Pert en Marcha, 1941, pp. 255- 
256). ; 
While silver declined, world competition in 
copper between the United States, Australia, 
Spain, and other countries continued to render 
unprofitable the mining of this metal in Peru. 
Nor were the archaic Spanish mining techniques 
applicable to the exploitation of copper. In 1894 
copper reached the all-time low price of 9 cents a 
