Regional Museum of Mine Site: North of Chile

Abandoned mines and their imprint on the territory

The project involves the ‘Transito’ mine, approximately 12 kilometres from Tierra Amarilla and 20 km from Copiapó. Explored by the English in the period 1743-48, the mine has remained redundant since then. It is the only mine in the location that maintains itself in a good state, with a colonial house (former administration building) that accommodates machinery within, and solid steel mine cart structures and tunnels. These, in perfect state, communicate through the subfloor with the ‘Andacollo’ mine seven-hundred metres from there. Given its importance as a cultural landscape, the Universidad de Atacama in conjunction with the Municipality of Tierra Amarilla launched a preservation programme to convert the ‘Tránsito’ mine into the first Mining Museum in Chile. The face itself is situated under eight kilometres of tunnels more than three hundred years old that reach a depth of five hundred metres: a distance equivalent to a one-hundred-and-seventy storey building, or the same as the altitude between Santiago and sea level, in other words, a real skyscraper in extension. This fact makes the abandoned mines an extremely potential panorama in terms of commercial/tourism exploitation in the north of Chile. The project, through two spot interventions, generates a circuit of tunnels, an ‘access’ building and an ‘exit’ one – one as the main building in the ‘Tránsito’ mine and the other in the ‘Andacollo’ mine as a mine extension centre. By uncovering a plate-like building, the main building in the ‘Tránsito’ mine connects 2 existing structures: the house and the main tunnel. This is resolved through spatial materialization of the only two directions of the mineralized vein. As they cross, they reveal themselves as the organizing axes of the building.

fotomontage proyecto 1 (centro de interpretación mina tránsito)

contexto y territorio

corte general y planta emplazamiento

fotomontajes proyecto 1

plantas proyecto 1 (centro de interpretación mina tránsito)

imágenes proyecto 1 (centro de interpretación mina tránsito)

cortes proyecto 1 (centro de interpretación mina tránsito)

proyecto 2 (centro de difusión minera, mina andacollo)

Project link: www.archiprix.org/project.php?id=2689