La Rinconada in Peru is officially the highest ‘city’ on Earth – and even has a Guinness World Record to prove it.
But the remote community, nestled in the Peruvian Andes 5,100 metres above sea level, probably won’t be winning any awards for its hospitality.
Nicknamed “Devil’s Paradise”, La Rinconada famously lacks plumbing with just three showers for 50,000 people, sanitation systems (rubbish is dumped in a vast pile outside the town) and has high levels of pollution from plastics and other types of trash.
Researchers also estimate that around 25 of its residents suffer from Hypoxia, a deficiency of oxygen reaching the tissues of the body, due to the low air pressure.
So why has such a large settlement persisted in this unforgiving environment? The answer is simple, gold.
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Located near a gold mine, the town began life as a small prospector camp before expanding rapidly.
Between 2001 and 2009, National Geographic estimated that the population exploded to as many as 30,000 people as the price of gold spiked by 235 percent over the period.
Now thought to be home to 50-70,000 people, La Rinconada is worked by a cooperative of miners who work for contractor for free for around 30 days. They’re then allowed to mine for themselves for a around a week and keep what they can extract, The Telegraph reports.
But the work is dangerous, and carries various health risks. Miners can work for years without ever coming across life-changing finds, and are often sickened by unsanitary drinking water, as well as dust particles from the mines and mercury used to extract gold.
Conditions for the people of La Rinconada are said to be dire, with residents caught in the grip of poverty and crime gangs that exploit them.
Miners been shot dead in the tunnels and young women are trafficked into brothels, Reuters reports.
In 2018, a Swiss refinery that had been sourcing metal from the site stopped after Peruvian prosecutors alleged the firm collecting it from Le Rinconada was a front for organised crime, according to the outlet.
The men of La Rinconada have banned women from the mines. But some live in shacks and make a living searching for gold in the rubble dumped by miners.
Back in 2020, Eva Chura told Reuters: “In a week sometimes I can get one gram or two grams of gold. If I’m lucky it can sometimes be 20 grams, but that’s down to luck.”
Chura and others in La Rinconada said the supply of gold that brought so many people to the region has started to dry up.
“It’s not like it used to be,” she said. “That’s why so many ugly things happen.”
The Peruvian government has been trying for years to persuade unlicensed prospectors to go legal. “People resist it, though, because they think they won’t earn enough,” engineer Jesús Álvarez Quispe from the Puno region Mining Ministry told DW in 2018.
He told the outlet colleagues to help him monitor 80,000 gold miners in southeastern Peru, a task he described as “a sheer impossibility.”
