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Mines/Chile

Escondida mine

Escondida mine, Chile. Producing, open pit, mining copper, silver, gold since 1990.

Why Escondida is famous

Chile's Escondida is a very large open-pit copper operation. BHP reports 1,261 kt of copper in the year to June 2026 (1,305 kt in FY2025), on a 100 per cent basis. Geochemical exploration from 1978 led to the discovery in 1981.1,2

Story cards

Timeline

  1. 1981Escondida porphyry copper found3

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

Escondida today

Where copper is mined todayWhere silver is mined todayWhere gold is mined todayMining in Chile

Where next

Mines

Same kind of depositBingham CanyonBingham has been mined since 1903. Escondida was found in 1981 and made 1,261 kt in a year.4ExamplesEl AbraChile copper: El Abra opened in 1996, Escondida in 1990.5

Events

Led toEscondida porphyry copper foundRead what happened near Escondida: Escondida porphyry copper found.1

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperEscondida belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.6

Sources

  1. Form 20-F for the year ended 30 June 2026 BHP Group (SEC)
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  3. La genesis de Escondida: el hallazgo que transformo la mineria chilena (opinion column by a participant) Guia Minera de Chile
  4. Kennecott operation page Rio Tinto
  5. Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025 Freeport-McMoRan Inc (SEC)
  6. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Haul trucks by Lechhabmed, CC BY-SA 4.0; Drilling and blasting by Siim Roov, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Falu gruva, Lundberg, Bengt A / Europeana (CC0 1.0).