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Mines/Peru

Toquepala mine

Toquepala mine, Peru. Producing, open pit, mining copper, molybdenum, silver since 1960.

Why Toquepala is famous

Toquepala is a large open-pit copper mine in southern Peru. Southern Copper has held an interest in the area since 1945, overburden removal began in 1957 and ore production in 1960. It has two concentrators of 60,000 t a day each, the second opened in the fourth quarter of 2018, and an SX-EW plant of 56,336 t a year of cathode. USGS credits the 2018 expansion for a 25 per cent rise in Southern Copper output in 2019.1,2,3

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

Toquepala today

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

Where next

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperToquepala belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.4

Sources

  1. Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025 Southern Copper Corporation (SEC)
  2. 2019 Minerals Yearbook, Peru US Geological Survey
  3. data/minerals/operations.csv (modern operations table) prospectortrails.com internal data
  4. 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; Froth flotation and tailings by Nina111955, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Escondida Mine, Chile, NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain (NASA media, no copyright)).