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La Rinconada
A gold-mining town in the Peruvian Andes, the highest permanent settlement on Earth
At up to about 5,100 meters above sea level, La Rinconada in southern Peru is the highest permanent settlement in the world, a town of metal-roofed shacks clinging to a mountainside beneath a glacier. Each breath there holds only about half the oxygen of a breath at sea level. The reason anyone lives at such a height is gold. Tens of thousands of people, by most estimates, have come to work informal mines tunneled into the mountain, many under a traditional arrangement known as cachorreo, in which they labor for a month without wages and then keep whatever ore they can carry out on a single day. Whether that ore holds any gold is largely luck.
La Rinconada lies in Ananea District, in San Antonio de Putina Province of the Puno Region, on the slopes of Mount Ananea not far from the Bolivian border. The town center sits at about 5,000 meters, with its highest homes near 5,100. Above it hangs the Auchita glacier, called La Bella Durmiente, the Sleeping Beauty, for the shape of its ridge. Nights fall below freezing for much of the year. The town has no sewage system and limited running water, and garbage and mining waste collect in the streets and streams. Mercury used to separate gold has contaminated water and the glacier, and researchers estimate that at least a quarter of residents suffer chronic illness from the lack of oxygen.
Gold has been worked in the Ananea highlands for centuries, but La Rinconada remained a small prospecting camp until the 2000s, when soaring gold prices drew a rush of migrants, many from elsewhere in the Puno highlands. Electricity arrived only in that decade. Population figures vary widely. Peru's 2017 census counted about 12,600 people in the whole of Ananea District, far below other estimates, which commonly put the town itself at 30,000 or more, rising and falling with the price of gold. Scientists study residents to learn how the human body adapts to extreme altitude. Authorities have added security cameras and guard posts to curb crime, while Peru weighs how to formalize informal mining and contain its environmental costs.