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Mines/Peru

Las Bambas mine

Las Bambas mine, Peru. Producing, open pit, mining copper, molybdenum, silver, gold since 2016.

Why Las Bambas is famous

Peruvian copper mine that reached commercial production in 2016. MMG reports 410,834 t of copper concentrate produced in 2025, against a plant design of 450,000 t a year.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

Las Bambas today

Where copper is mined todayWhere molybdenum is mined todayWhere silver is mined todayWhere gold is mined todayMining in Peru

Where next

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperLas Bambas belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.3

Sources

  1. Las Bambas operation page MMG
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  3. 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: Ball mills and SAG mills by photosmith2011, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pictures: Escondida Mine, Chile, NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain (NASA media, no copyright)).