A town in the barrens

With what grows here (barley and dredge), this land can feed a town of about 310 people from farms less than a day's cart from its walls.

Build a town in the barrens

A town of 10,000 here

Its grain comes from 140 km around, 6 days by cart (not by land alone). About 1,400 villages and 79,000 country people farm it, and the town keeps about 40 scholars. A city of 3,000 cannot live off this land alone.

In history

Potosí grew at about 4,000 m beneath the Cerro Rico, whose silver an Indigenous prospector, Diego Huallpa, is traditionally said to have found in 1545. By one estimate the mountain yielded 60% of the world's silver in the second half of the 16th century, and the town's population is said to have passed 200,000. It lived on what half a continent sent it: mercury from Huancavelica, dried fish from the Atacama, tallow, jerky, horses and fine woods from Tucumán, sugar and preserves from Cuzco and Arequipa, wine and olives from Tarija and Moquegua. The labour was forced. Under the mita, 13,000 Indigenous men a year, about one adult man in seven across a vast region, were drafted to the mines.

Around 1050 Bernard of Menthon, archdeacon of Aosta, founded a hospice at 2,469 m on the Great St Bernard Pass to put an end to the brigands who preyed on travellers. An older hospice lower down, at Bourg-Saint-Pierre, had been destroyed by Saracen raiders, probably in 940. A community of canons has run the house ever since. In the late 17th century they began keeping big dogs, first as guards, then to find travellers lost in fog and snow.

How large a city?

PeopleGrain fromBy cartVillagesScholars
3,00077 km around3.5 days (not by land alone)42012
10,000140 km around6 days (not by land alone)1,40040
40,000280 km around11.5 days (not by land alone)5,500160
150,000550 km around22 days (not by land alone)21,000600
1,000,0001,400 km around56.5 days (not by land alone)140,0004,000

Living there

There are no woods to spare here. The town needs about 18,000 tonnes of wood a year for its hearths and workshops: it burns straw (about 11,000 tonnes a year), dung and brush, and buys the rest. Provisional figure.

Its market sells grain, herbs, maize, wool and cheese, and buys timber, iron and salt. About 830 market towns stand in its countryside.

About 40% of what its people eat does not come from the fields. Of that share: herds 90%, gardens 10%. That is some 8,000 livestock units on 120 km² of pasture. Hearth estimate.

What makes it hard

  • Everything arrives by caravan: food, timber and even tallow for lamps come from valleys and plains far away, and the town eats only as long as the roads stay open.
  • The work kills: in Potosí men carried loads of 45 to 135 kg up rickety ladders by the light of a candle tied to the forehead, and climbing from hot shafts into freezing air brought pneumonia.
  • Silver is refined with mercury, and mercury poisons the people who handle it.
  • Brigands haunt the passes: the Great St Bernard hospice was founded to stop the robbing of travellers.
  • Avalanches: according to an account of 1823, one buried the hospice's oldest dogs along with some travellers, and only three or four puppies left at home survived.

Hard years

About one year in 8, the harvest falls below four fifths of a normal one: the town is short of some 560 of the 1,900 tonnes of grain its land gives it, with no water to bring the gap in. A plague that kills 39% of the town, as the Black Death did in Europe's towns, would leave about 24,000 km² of its fields idle.

What it can make

Grain (at a cost), Flax (at a cost), Dye plants (at a cost), Orchards (at a cost), Herbs, Maize, Wool, Horses (at a cost), Cattle and hides (at a cost), Cheese, Pigs and bacon (at a cost), Goats, Honey and wax

What its land cannot give, a town here must buy: timber.

What it lives on

Barley and dredge

Underground

What a city digs depends on the rock under it: Granite, Volcanic rock, Ultramafic rock (peridotite, serpentinite), Schist and gneiss, Marble, Limestone and chalk, Sandstone, shale and clay, Salt beds, River gravels and sands

Found here

Gathered (Rerum): Arctic Hare Fur, Arctic Hare Meat, Beetle Wing, Chamois Meat, Iceland Moss, Moss Campion Root, Mountain Sorrel Leaves, Mycelium

Hear it

Barrens in Biomes: plants, animals, hazards and sounds

The same climate

A town in the barrens, on a river, A town in the barrens, on the coast

By city size

1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000, 1,000,000

Sources

Open the city builder — MGS Toolbox