COMPARISON OF SOUTH AND NORTH AMERICA HISTORIC MINING TOWNS
Both South and North America have numerous old mining camps that developed town sites at one time, but there is a distinct difference in their development through time up to the present. After having just finished a four day trip in Colorado visiting five historic mining towns (Telluride, Ouray, Silverton, Lake City, and Pitkin) the contrast became apparent that the way these towns developed over a hundred years ago was markedly different between the continents.
In North America, many of the old mining towns are visited by tourists. Some of the top locations include Deadwood in South Dakota, Telluride, Ouray, and Silverton in Colorado, then Oatman, Jerome, and Bisbee are popular in Arizona, Virginia City in Nevada, and the Sierra Nevada’s Mother Lode Belt towns of Sonora, Columbia, and Jamestown in California. What do all these places have that attract tourists? They are clean, orderly, some have casinos, and good dining. Telluride has turned into an upscale skiing center, high property values, art galleries, and many of them today have micro-breweries. Some of these areas have been selected by retirees to live in. Many North America mining towns have organized replica underground mine tours.
The historic North America mining towns preserve interesting old buildings from the glory days. And these mark hotel-saloons, banks, general stores, and a variety of service businesses. Many of these towns were built by competing interests; most of these mining camps had numerous mining companies working side by side. In contrast, most South America mining towns were originally Spanish operated; they come with old Colonial Catholic churches. They lack the history of competing mining companies, and do not have locally established banks.
Very few tourists will come to visit the mining camps in South America , and when they do it is for entirely different reasons. The most popular mining city in South America for foreign tourists is Potosi, a city that has hundreds of years more history than all of the North American cities. People come to Potosi because of this old mining history that continues today with thousands of artisanal miners working the nearly exhausted old silver-zinc veins. The South American mining towns do not spend much time talking about “the way it was.” Very few will have a museum, and you can forget about art or tourist souvenir shops. Potosi is about the only town in South America that offers active underground mine tours, an activity extremely sketchy for safety of the visitor.
Very few historic mining camps in South America continue today as population centers; the notable ones that have turned into cities are Marmato in Colombia, Cerro de Pasco, and Huancavelica in Peru, Potosi in Bolivia, Ouro Preto in Brazil, Famatina in Argentina, and Copiapo in Chile. Most of these places are all edgy and do not represent areas where retirees would choose to live.
Copiapo, Chile remains an active growing city, with new shopping malls, new apartment towers, and it is a mining hub for numerous small scale underground mines operated by Chilean companies. The bars are generally low-class and do not preserve any historical context. In contrast, in Austin, Nevada, the saloon there has been continuously operating since 1880 and still has the original wooden bar. But Copiapo also has numerous operating brothels. The most direct comparison between Copiapo and a North America mining town would be with Elko, Nevada; both our hubs to outlying active mines, and neither one has much of interest for the tourist. Copiapo at least has a mineral museum. The pubs of Elko are slightly better than those of Copiapo. It takes a geologist to log time in these places to have the references for comparison. Repeated visits determine which hotels have the best set up. As the years go by one learns where to buy a house or rent an apartment, etc.
Cerro de Pasco in Peru marks a very long lived mining town, a place that is bitter cold, and constructed in the ugly third world fashion. The town supports a small university campus. The food and accommodations in this town of over 50,000 people is terrible. At just over 4,300 meters (14,100 ft.), the nights are crisp, leading many residents to walk about with blankets on their shoulders and wearing their distinctive dark-blue wool hats. We had family working and living in Cerro de Pasco fifty years ago. Yani’s uncle was a well-known tailor in the mining town. The silver veins were first mined extensively by the Spanish beginning in 1630, but the town did not greatly expand until the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation made the open pit in 1956, which the town now completely surrounds.
The mining history in old camps that closed in South America was largely stripped away, salvaged, very little remains of what was once on site. North America mining towns were built of wood, brick, and stone, the South America towns are largely constructed from adobe. These material choices reflect preservation. Many wood structures in wetter climates rot away or burn down. Adobe structures in the Andes topple with the many earthquakes. In South America, the periods of terrorism, economic upheavals, political instability, and social unrest contribute to dismantling the mining towns. Only in Chile have we seen remote mine sites that had the graves robbed. Many mining towns in North America were similarly dismantled, but the number surviving to become renewed commercial areas is far higher. In part this reflects the national GDP per capita in the USA being five times that of Chile and ten times that of Peru. Additionally, the direction of the South America tourist is not aimed at mining towns, instead beaches, casinos, and national parks are the preferred venues.
Whether or not the mining towns of South America will ever experience a cultural shift towards national curiosity of the past history and transform into places that people return to spend money that remains for the murky crystal ball to reveal. Most likely the trend of all wealth accumulating each country’s capital city will continue. But this is fine for some of the remote mining sites remaining abandoned and forgotten, like San Antonio de Lípez in Bolivia, or Chanarcillo in Chile, where one can almost hear the ghosts in the silence.
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South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.
