Chuquicamata copper mine

Chuquicamata copper mine - darkometer rating : 5 - This is a truly extreme attraction in northern Chile : the gigantic open-pit copper mine and adjacent smelter plant at Chuquicamata, in the Atacama desert. It is possible to go on a special tour for visitors (it's the only way of seeing the mine). The tour offered by the same company that runs the mine (called CODELCO) should include at least some good views of the enormous otherworldly pit. This is, after all, one of the largest man-made holes: half a mile deep and ca. two to three miles across, in reddish Martian-like rocky soil. Hairpin roads go down the terraced sides of the pit. Blasting of more rock is done every day. Hundreds of thousands of tons of copper ore are extracted here – it's one of Chile's most significant sources of income. These are the biggest copper ore deposits in the whole world (not just at this mine, there are others in the Atacama as well as further south, such as El Teniente, the largest underground copper mine – cf. Chile ). You can also still see the fleet of humungous yellow trucks at work that cart away up to 300 tons of rubble at a time each and dump their load onto the mine's gigantic slag heaps. If you ever wanted to get a feel for a "Total Recall"-like industrial hell on red dusty Mars – this is it. In the past you were even allowed a close-up look at the smelting process inside the adjacent plant, a hot, noisy, dirty, and almost apocalyptic spectacle to behold. But unfortunately, the inclusion of this as part of the tour has currently been discontinued, at least for the time being. Shame – I've seen footage of it in a documentary and would have loved to see it for real. In the end I couldn't even get on one of the regular tours at all.