The largest open-pit mine, mining 100 years of gold and copper, 20,000 employees with an annual profit of 20 billion, the first industry.
When the Spaniards invaded Chile again in 1540, they divided it into north and south, which the South American Indians discovered later that on the Chilean map, the richer lands of the south were used for agriculture and animal husbandry, while the northern desert was mainly used for the exploitation of mineral resources. One of the largest open-pit mines in the world, in the eyes of the colonists, was like a "treasure", and they expanded the colonies of the entire South American state by sending various arms and ships to Europe and the United States.
The Chuqui Camata gold and copper mining area near Camara in northern Chile has always been the first choice of colonial immigrants due to its location in a desert area, but due to the level of technology and transportation capacity, the Chilean colonies have always been small-scale mining and copper ore until Chile decided to join forces with the British in 1879, decades after gaining independence. However, the British were only thinking about how to keep this huge "treasure" for themselves, so they did not use the most advanced mining and smelting technology, but because of negligence, more than 30 people**.
In 1915, due to the lack of sufficient currency, Chile** decided to expand mining, recruiting thousands of workers in Camara, and when they began to dig more than a hundred meters below the ground of Chuqui Camata, they were shocked by the mineral deposits inside. Chuki Kamata is a fault zone of several hundred kilometers long, which is caused by the movement of plate faults about 330,000 years ago, and geothermal action caused a variety of metals and sulfides to accumulate and melt, and developed along a fault zone several hundred meters long. Chuki Kamata is the largest area of diameter and largest reserves.
Prospectors from the Chilean Mining Authority said in their diary that it was a massive mine full of brass, borne, and a content of 138% primary minerals. In the process of excavation, molybdenum, gold ore and other minerals have been discovered one after another, and the total amount of minerals ranks first in the world. As soon as the news spread, tens of thousands of miners from all over the world flocked to Kamala to start a "brass fever" that turned the area into one pit after another.
According to the Chilean Mining Authority, in 1923 there were more than 700 large and small mines, more than 2,000 underground water supply lines, and more than 40,000 workers from European and South American countries. Such unbridled and planned mining activities have spread even to Kamala, more than 20 kilometres away, where the already scarce water resources are plummeting, the skies are becoming more gloomy and the environment is getting worse.
To achieve this, Chile, with the help of American specialists, spent a lot of money to build a furnace, dug up a thirteen-kilometer pipeline from the Andes, then bought a machine similar to the Panama Canal, and built a port and a fuel-fired power station. After 104 years of hard work, Chuquikamata had mined 29 million tonnes of pure copper in 2018, with the lowest being 4,345 tonnes and 2012 being 855,000 tonnes.
Long-term mining is very demanding on workers, and the high content of sulfate in Chuquicamatta copper ore and the toxic components in the dust have led Chilean authorities to limit the number of coal miners to 20,000 and cycle them every three years. To house more than 20,000 miners and their families, they also built the world's largest mining base, home to a school, a cinema, a hospital and a club, three kilometres from the mine.
Moreover, the site is the largest in the whole of Chile, and this is the first industrial mining in Chile, and the lack of related work has led to the number of people working at the Chuquicamata-Copper Mine at a consistently high level. However, Chuquicamatta is a treasure trove for Chileans, and the camp symbolizes Chile's "new industries and economic development", so more young local miners are here to spend the next three years in this dusty land.
A large-scale ** mine carried out last September expanded the Chuquikamata mine to a depth of 900 metres, 43,000 metres long and 3,000 metres wide, larger than any open pit mine in the world. According to Chuquicamata's annual report, Chuquicamatta has had about 20,000 workers in the last 30 years, producing between 50 and 855,000 tons per year, and making an average annual profit of US$3 billion, or 1% of Chile's GDP.