Simón Iturri Patiño
Bolivian businessperson (1860-1947)
Simón Iturri Patiño (1 June 1860 – 20 April 1947) was a Bolivian industrialist who was among the world's wealthiest people at the time of his death. With a fortune built from ownership of a majority of the tin industry in Bolivia, Patiño was nicknamed "The Andean Rockefeller". During World War II, Patiño was believed to be one of the five wealthiest men in the world.
Biography
Patiño's biographers are not in agreement on the details of his early life. Many wrote that he was a cholo, with a mixed Quechua and Spanish heritage, and born to a poor mother, while his authorized biography holds that he was solely of European ancestry, and the son of a provincial leader. He was actually the illegitimate son of Julio Abasto and María Patiño from Cochabamba. Before entering the mining industry, he either managed a store in Oruro, or spent years in private schools.
Eventually, Patiño started in mining with Compañía Huanchaca de Bolivia, a silver company, and then with Fricke y Compañía. Patiño was assigned to collections for the store, and in 1894, he agreed to accept a deed of land in compromise for a $250 debt owed by a prospector. The deed turned out to be for the rocky side of a mountain, and Patiño was fired from his job for settling an account in exchange for a worthless piece of property.
The public source identifies “Simón Iturri Patiño” as bolivian businessperson (1860-1947). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Simón, Iturri and Patiño.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q561365. VIAF identifies the subject as 58935837. The Library of Congress control number is nr91018104. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1860, 1947 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simón Iturri Patiño” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.