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Mines/Botswana

Orapa mine

Orapa mine, Botswana. Producing, open pit, mining diamonds since 1971.

Why Orapa is famous

Orapa is described by De Beers as the largest open-pit diamond mine in the world by area. Wikidata gives 1971 as the inception year. Debswana operates it.1,2

Story cards

Timeline

  1. 1 March and 25 April 1967De Beers finds the Orapa kimberlite3
  2. 1971Orapa mine officially opened3

What kind of deposit

Kimberlite and lamproite pipe

Orapa today

Mining in Botswana

Where next

People

Led bySeretse KhamaOrapa opened in 1971 as a Debswana mine.4

Mines

Same kind of depositMir diamond mineOrapa is the largest open-pit diamond mine by area. Mir was found in 1955.1

Events

Led toDe Beers finds the Orapa kimberliteRead what happened near Orapa: De Beers finds the Orapa kimberlite.1Led toOrapa mine officially openedRead what happened near Orapa: Orapa mine officially opened.1

Deposit types

An example ofKimberlite and lamproite pipeOrapa belongs to the kimberlite and lamproite pipe family of deposits.5

Sources

  1. Our mines page De Beers Group
  2. Orapa diamond mine Wikidata
  3. Report to Stakeholders 2014 (key milestones 1967 to 2014) Debswana Diamond Company
  4. Botswana (political geography) Encyclopedia.com (reprinting a publisher's reference work)
  5. 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: Ore sorting by Tomra Sorting GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Kimberley, South Africa: the Kimberley mine and town. Woodburytype, 1888, after a photograph by Robert Harris., Harris, Robert, active 1881-1888. (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Kopermijn te Kolwezi in de provincie Shaba (Katanka), Mieremet, Rob / Anefo / Europeana (Public Domain Mark 1.0).