Diego de Huallpa

Diego de Huallpa was a Quechua Indian of sixteenth-century Upper Peru, credited with the accidental discovery of silver on the Cerro Rico at Potosí in 1545. Tradition says he lit a fire against the cold while looking for a lost llama and found silver in the ashes.

He sold the silver and told his companion Huanca. After a quarrel between them, the story reached the Spaniards at Porco, and the mountain became a great silver mine.

Huallpa won no reward; the legendary native leader Chaqui Catari cursed him for revealing the mountain. He later told Viceroy Toledo of a shrine on its slopes.