There is gold in this mountain, billions of dollars of it, locked in rock more than 4,500 meters above the sea where the Andes form the spine between Chile and Argentina. For decades, that promise drew the world's largest gold company to a remote, frozen ridge in the southern Atacama. Yet for all the money sunk into Pascua-Lama, no commercial ounce was ever mined. What happened here instead became one of the defining environmental struggles of the region: a contest between an enormous mineral fortune and the glaciers, rivers, and communities living downstream.
The numbers are staggering. Pascua-Lama is estimated to hold around 17 million ounces of gold and 635 million ounces of silver, with roughly three-quarters of the deposit on the Chilean side and the rest in Argentina. The project became legally possible when the two nations signed a Mining Integration Treaty in 1997, ratified in 2000, allowing companies to work ore bodies straddling the border. Toronto-based Barrick Gold took up the prize, and Chile's environmental commission granted final approval in 2006. The plan was an open pit at the crest of the Central Andes, with an output of hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold a year. On paper, it looked like one of the great mines of the century.
But the mountain does not stand alone. Glaciers cling to these peaks, including ice known as Toro 1, Toro 2, and Esperanza, and their meltwater feeds the Huasco Valley far below, where tens of thousands of farmers depend on the rivers that drain from the high country. Opponents feared that mining at this altitude would damage the ice and foul the water with the acids and metals that gold extraction can release. Barrick maintained that it had no plans to move any glaciers, that doing so would violate its permits, and that authorities had imposed hundreds of strict conditions before allowing any work. The company argued the project would be done responsibly and would bring thousands of jobs. The two sides never came close to agreeing on the risk.
Among those most directly affected were the Diaguita Huascoaltinos, an Indigenous community of around 1,200 people living in the upper reaches of the Huasco Valley, on land their families had farmed and grazed for generations. They saw the glaciers not as obstacles to a mine but as the source of their water and their way of life. The community pressed its case through Chile's courts and invoked international law, including the International Labour Organization's Convention 169, which affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to a say over development on their territory. Their resistance, alongside that of environmental groups and valley farmers, kept the project under relentless legal and public pressure for years.
By late 2013, after pouring roughly five billion dollars into a project once budgeted at eight and a half, Barrick suspended construction and wrote down billions in losses. The reckoning came in September 2020, when Chile's First Environmental Court ordered the total and definitive closure of the Chilean side of Pascua-Lama and imposed a multimillion-dollar fine, finding that Barrick had failed to properly monitor the glaciers and had harmed the quality of a nearby river. Chile's Supreme Court later upheld the closure. For the Diaguita and their allies, it was a historic victory, the first time a project of this size and profile had been shut down so completely. Today the gold remains in the mountain, and the ice, for now, still feeds the valley below.
The Pascua-Lama project site sits at 29.32 degrees south, 70.02 degrees west, straddling the Chile-Argentina border at the crest of the Central Andes, at an elevation above 4,500 meters and rising toward 5,000 meters at the mine itself. From the air this is high, glaciated terrain: bare rock, permanent snow and ice fields, and the scars of access roads and construction camps near the Cerros Nevados. The Huasco Valley drains westward toward the Pacific. The nearest airport with commercial service is La Serena's La Florida Airport (ICAO SCSE), well to the west on the Chilean coast; San Juan (ICAO SANU) lies to the east on the Argentine side. Recommended viewing altitude is well above the 5,000-meter (about 16,400-foot) terrain; expect strong winds, severe cold, and rapidly changing mountain weather.