LA RINCONADA - HIGHEST CITY IN THE WORLD
La Rinconada is the world' s highest city. It is located in the Peruvian Andes at an altitude of 5,100 metres above sea level. With average temperatures around the freezing point, more than 50,000 people live in this inhospitable place. Their motive: gold.
The town is located on the edge of a huge gold mine, and its population has grown rapidly as the price of gold has risen - 200 percent in just a few years.
Around 40,000 people work in and around the mine, which is half an hour's walk from the city centre. While the men dig for gold in the ice tunnels, the women's work is restricted to the search for other metals, which they hammer out of debris from the mines. It is an old Peruvian superstition that prohibits them from entering the mine. In the 1990s, child labour was even still widespread in the mines of La Rinconada.
Today, most of the miners work according to the cachorreo system: for 30 days they search for gold on behalf of a company, but on the 31st day they are allowed to keep all their finds.
Compared to the size of the population, the infrastructure of La Rinconada has not grown in the same pace. There is no running water in the town, no sewage system, and the streets are covered with mud and thick pipes through which rinse water is pumped into the mine. The nearest major hospital is in Puno, about seven hours away. At least a secure food supply from lower-lying towns has become possible in recent years.
The biggest and omnipresent problem is the lack of waste disposal and the pollution of the place. Mountains of rubbish pile up everywhere, and highly toxic mercury, used in the mines during the search for gold, is present in extremely high quantities.
Remote from the rest of the world, and with only one small police station, desperate gold seekers meet in the dark bars of the town and underaged sex workers are lured here by the sometimes generous "mineros". The city is reminiscent of a modern "Wild West".
