Oruro - History

The city of Oruro was founded on November 1st, 1606 by Don Manuel Castro de Padilla. The city was formally born as Real Villa de Don Felipe de Austria, in honor of then Spanish monarch Felipe III. Oruro owes its existence to the discovery in the early 1605 of rich silver-concentrated minerals in the Urus region, where the city derives its name from. During the 17th century, Oruro became the largest city in the Alto Peru region.

However, exhaustive mining activities exclusively on silver extraction prompted Indian workers to moved on to more lucrative prospects. Oruro became then an abandoned city. Oruro revived as a mining town by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this time with the production of tin. In 1887, Simon I. Patiño, later one of the wealthiest men in the world, bought La Salvadora, a tin mine located east of the city of Oruro.

 Later on, La Salvadora became the world's most productive tin mine. Currently, Oruro in not the prosperous city it use to be long time ago and certainly is not one of the fastest growing cities in the country. By November 1996, according to data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), Oruro's population was composed by 199,260 inhabitants.

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