The National Mint is Potosí’s star attraction and one of South America’s finest museums. Potosí’s first mint was constructed on the present site of the Casa de Justicia in 1572 under orders from the Viceroy of Toledo. This, its replacement, is a vast and strikingly beautiful building that takes up a whole city block. It was built between 1753 and 1773 to control the minting of colonial coins; legend has it that when the king of Spain saw the bill for its construction, he exclaimed ‘that building must be made of silver’ (expletive presumably deleted). These coins, which bore the mint mark ‘P, ’ were known as potosís.
