Andacollo's wealth was in its rock long before anyone built a church here. The hills hold gold and copper, and the diggings are ancient. Evidence suggests the Inca Empire valued the place enough to resettle a community of Churumata people here from what is now Bolivia to work it, and a colonial-era gold mine still carried the name Churumata in their memory. When Spanish prospectors followed, they were chasing the same veins indigenous miners had already opened. The town that grew up in these ravines has always been a mining town first, its fortunes rising and falling with the price of metal and the patience of the people willing to dig for it.

The story of how the Madonna came here survives in more than one version, as the best stories do. In one, an indigenous miner remembered as Collo found a small wooden figure of the Virgin hidden among the rocks, and she asked him to build her a church on the spot. In another, a Spanish priest fled the burning of La Serena during the indigenous uprising of 1549, carried a statue of Mary into these mountains, and, too exhausted to go further, buried her in an old gold working. Either way, the carving became Our Lady of Andacollo, the Virgen Morena, the dark-skinned Madonna whom miners adopted as their patron. The Vatican crowned the statue solemnly in 1901, an honor granted to only the most revered images in the Catholic world.

The Fiesta Grande each December is devotion turned into endurance. It opens around the twenty-third and runs for days, drawing pilgrims and dance fraternities from across the region and beyond. The oldest of these are the bailes chinos, whose name comes from a Quechua word for servant; for an hour at a stretch a dancer balances on one foot blowing a high note on a reed flute, then stamps down hard on the other foot for a lower one, the rhythm relentless and trancelike. In the 1940s the costumed diablada, the devil dance borrowed from Bolivian tradition, joined the older Chilean forms. For miners whose work is dangerous and whose luck is never certain, the Virgin is the one asked to heal the sick and bring the lost safely back from underground.

Today an open-pit copper mine, Carmen de Andacollo, works the same ground from an industrial scale the old miners could never have imagined. Its modern history is tangled and political. Land was consolidated beginning in 1975, when the Pinochet government let the state miner ENAMI buy up surface property from Andacollo's residents; one businessman, Andrónico Luksic, held out until he was offered a swap for a mining claim elsewhere. The deposit was offered to international bidders again and again through the 1980s, with companies circling and declining, before a joint venture finally accepted ENAMI's terms in 1994 and the modern mine opened in 1996. The Canadian company Teck Resources now owns ninety percent of it, with ENAMI holding the rest. The pilgrims and the pit share the same hills, the sacred and the extractive layered one over the other.