Qualla: El Teniente https://qualla.com/el-teniente en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:39:57 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: El Teniente https://qualla.com/el-teniente El Teniente: Introduction https://qualla.com/el-teniente/ Photo credit Pablo Trincado from Santiago de Chile, Chile, CC BY 2.0. There are more than three thousand kilometers of tunnels inside this mountain - enough, laid end to end, to cross a continent. From the surface El Teniente looks like a scar of roads and dumps on an Andean slope at 2,300 meters. Underground, it is the largest underground copper mine on the planet, a hollowed labyrinth where some five thousand workers move ore out of the rock around the clock. The name means "The Lieutenant" in Spanish, and according to local legend the deposit was found in the 1800s by a fugitive Spanish officer who needed somewhere to vanish. The mountain has been giving up copper ever since, and central Chile has been built, in no small part, on what comes out of it.

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Image: Pablo Trincado from Santiago de Chile, Chile | CC BY 2.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/63vy-el-teniente-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full El Teniente: From Ponies to Block Caving https://qualla.com/el-teniente/ Photo credit Waldemar Lindgren and Edson Bastin, Public domain. Extraction here began in 1819, when the best ore was hacked out by hand from the Fortuna sector and carried out on the backs of ponies and mules. The high-grade veins were exhausted by 1897. Then in 1904 an engineer from New York named William Braden, with the financier E. W. Nas...

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Image: Waldemar Lindgren and Edson Bastin | Public domain

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/63vy-el-teniente-from-ponies-to-block-caving.mp3 0:06 2 full El Teniente: The Copper Nation https://qualla.com/el-teniente/ Photo credit WeHaKa, CC BY-SA 4.0. Chileans call operations on this scale la Gran Mineria del Cobre, the great copper mining, and for most of the twentieth century these mines supplied a huge share of the foreign currency the country earned. That made ownership a political question as much as an economic one. In 1...

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Image: WeHaKa | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/63vy-el-teniente-the-copper-nation.mp3 0:06 3 full El Teniente: Where Workers Made History https://qualla.com/el-teniente/ Photo credit WeHaKa, CC BY-SA 4.0. A mine that employs thousands becomes a stage for the country's struggles. In 1983, El Teniente and two sister mines shut down when roughly 13,000 workers voted to strike indefinitely after a union leader was arrested for calling for an end to military rule - and at least 3,300 w...

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Image: WeHaKa | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/63vy-el-teniente-where-workers-made-history.mp3 0:06 4 full El Teniente: Digging Deeper, Carefully https://qualla.com/el-teniente/ Photo credit WeHaKa, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mountain is not done, and neither is the mine. Since 2011 Codelco has pursued the New Mine Level project, an enormous effort to extend the workings deeper into the rock without ever halting production above. But going deeper into a stressed mountain has its own dangers. On Ju...

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Image: WeHaKa | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/3/v/y/el-teniente-wp/63vy-el-teniente-digging-deeper-carefully.mp3 0:06 5 full