Qualla: Pascua Lama https://qualla.com/pascua-lama en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:39:57 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Pascua Lama https://qualla.com/pascua-lama Pascua Lama: Introduction https://qualla.com/pascua-lama/ 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.

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]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/y/1/pascua-lama-wp/66y1-pascua-lama-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Pascua Lama: A Mountain of Gold https://qualla.com/pascua-lama/ 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 signe...

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]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/y/1/pascua-lama-wp/66y1-pascua-lama-a-mountain-of-gold.mp3 0:06 2 full Pascua Lama: The Water Below https://qualla.com/pascua-lama/ 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 f...

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]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/y/1/pascua-lama-wp/66y1-pascua-lama-the-water-below.mp3 0:06 3 full Pascua Lama: The Diaguita Stand https://qualla.com/pascua-lama/ 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 ...

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]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/y/1/pascua-lama-wp/66y1-pascua-lama-the-diaguita-stand.mp3 0:06 4 full Pascua Lama: The Mine That Never Was https://qualla.com/pascua-lama/ 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 definiti...

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]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/6/y/1/pascua-lama-wp/66y1-pascua-lama-the-mine-that-never-was.mp3 0:06 5 full