Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works

Brief Description

planta de lixiviacion © UNESCO

Justification for Inscription

Criterion (ii): The development of the saltpeter industry reflects the combined knowledge, skills, technology, and financial investment of a diverse community of people who were brought together from around South America, and from Europe. The saltpeter industry became a huge cultural exchange complex where ideas were quickly absorbed and exploited. The two works represent this process.

Criterion (iii): The saltpeter mines and their associated company towns developed into an extensive and very distinct urban community with its own language, organisation, customs, and creative expressions, as well as displaying technical entrepreneurship. The two nominated works represent this distinctive culture.

Criterion (iv): The saltpeter mines in the north of Chile together became the largest producers of natural saltpeter in the world, transforming the Pampa and indirectly the agricultural lands that benefited from the fertilisers the works produced. The two works represent this transformation process.

Long Description

The development of the saltpeter industry reflects the combined knowledge, skills, technology, and financial investment of a diverse community of people who were brought together from around South America and from Europe. The saltpeter industry became a huge cultural exchange complex where ideas were quickly absorbed and exploited. The two works represent this process. The saltpeter mines and their associated company towns developed into an extensive and very distinct urban community with its own language, organization, customs and creative expressions, as well as displaying technical entrepreneurship. The saltpeter mines in the north of Chile together became the largest producers of natural saltpeter in the world, transforming the Pampa and indirectly the agricultural lands that benefited from the fertilisers the works produced. The two works represent this transformation process and the distinctive culture that it produced.

The two abandoned saltpeter works lie in the Tamarugal Pampa and are 1.5 km apart, separated by Route A16. Saltpeter (sodium nitrate) deposits are found in an arid, desert altiplano in the far north of Chile, in the regions of Tarapacá and Antofagasta - the Pampa, which is one of the driest deserts in the world with virtually no annual rainfall, and large differences in temperature between day and night. The porous Pampa filters water coming down from the Andes Mountains. Near the coastal ridge, the water formed small lakes in the impermeable granite-like rock, giving rise to 'salt pans' as a result of the evaporation of water, and 'saltpeter' beds in fissures between the hard and softer rocks.

The mining of saltpeter began at the foot of the eastern edge of the Coastal Range, first for manufacturing explosives and then more profitably as a fertilizer that was exported around the world. Defying the extremes of climate, 200 works to mine and process the saltpeter, with towns to house the workers and railways to transport the powder to coast, were established in an intensive period of around 50 years from 1880. The huge extent of the deposits and the high grade and thickness of the saltpeter veins turned the Pampa into the main producer of natural nitrate in the world. During the 1920s, competition from synthetic nitrates in Europe led to the closure of many works and by 1933 most of the industry had come to an almost complete standstill. The Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter works are two that have managed in part to survive the asset stripping that followed the decline of the nitrate industry. None of the buildings are now in use apart from some bathrooms that have been restored for the use of visitors and a reception building.

Together they represent the technical and social systems that created great wealth and prosperity for some and arduous, communal living for others. The Pampinos, those who live in the Pampa, are now seen as pioneers in the social struggle for better working conditions, and their distinctive and creative culture is celebrated in print and film.

Historical Description

From pre-Hispanic times indigenous peoples in the area, the Atacamenos and the Incas, used nitrate as a fertiliser, extracting and grinding the saltpeter and spreading it on fields.

The first Europeans used the saltpeter for explosives. The mineral was mined and sent on mules to Lima to be processed into gunpowder. Increase in demand for explosives in the late 18th century led to exploration of new fields in northern Chile and the discovery of the Tarapaca seams. At around the same time, a German scientist, Thadeus Haencke, discovered how to manufacture potassium nitrate. The first saltpeter works were opened in 1810. These were small-scale individual operators who extracted and crushed the material by hand, boiled it in simple vats and left it in the sun to evaporate. The first shipments were made to Great Britain in the 1820s and to the USA and France in the 1830s, all for use in explosives.

Its fertilising properties were discovered in Europe in the 1830s and demand started to soar as cereal production begun to spread to unexploited lands in USA, Argentina and Russia. The fertiliser also begun to be used for coffee in Brazil, Sugar in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Chile became the main world producer of natural nitrate. What transformed the scale and scope of the works was a new processing technique developed by the Chilean Pedro Gamboni in 1853 for dissolving saltpeter. This encouraged owners to install fixed equipment: boilers, troughs etc and expand homes for workers. A second factor was improved transport: until the railways arrived in the second half of the 19th century, transport to the coast on packhorse mules limited the scale of the industry. The railways spread rapidly, funded by private investment: by 1905 there were 1,787 km of track and by 1913, 5,000 km.

In 1879 the so-called Saltpeter War involving Chile, Bolivia and Peru (who supported Bolivia) gave Chile dominance of the industry. The aftermath encouraged European investment and this in turn acted as a trigger for a surge in the nation's economy. By 1890 saltpeter accounted for 50% of the country's total revenue; by 1913 80% of all its exports.

The First World War brought terrible consequences for the saltpeter producers. The sea routes became unsafe and Germany, one of the largest importers, begun to develop its own saltpeter based on synthetic ammonia. However as European investors withdrew, Chilean participation increased. Nevertheless demand continued to decline and in spite of re-structuring, the creation of the Chilean Saltpeter Company (COSACH) split between state and private investors, and a new production system, which allowed the use of lower grade ore, the market did not improve and COSACH was wound up. By 1930s only 10% of the world's nitrate came from Chile and this had dropped to 3% by 1950s. COSACH's successor, COSATAN, which had a monopoly of saltpeter, survived until 1961. The Peruvian Nitrate Company built Humberstone saltpeter works, originally known as La Palma, in 1862. Until 1889, it was one of the biggest saltpeter-mines in Tarapacá zone with about 3,000 inhabitants. With the economic crisis that affected all the production of sodium nitrate, La Palma was shut down to be reopened in 1933 under the ownership of the COSACH and bearing the name by which it is known now, the Humberstone saltpeter work, in homage to chemical engineer Humberstone. Between 1933 and 1940 the operations were expanded, new buildings built around the Market Square and the population reached 3,700 people.

Santa Laura Work, built ten years after Humberstone in 1872 by the ‘Barra y Risco' Company, was smaller and had only 450 families in 1920. After facing successive crisis, it too was taken over by COSATAN.

In 1959 COSATAN was wound up and the two works closed finally. The works were auctioned in 1961. Both were bought by the same private individual for scrap. In order to avoid them being destroyed, the properties were declared national monuments in 1970. This has not stopped quite drastic deterioration, robberies and vandalism and some dismantling.

After the owner went bankrupt, in 1995 the properties came under the control of the ‘Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales' (National Assets Ministry) and they have assigned them for a period of thirty years to the Saltpeter Museum Corporation, a non-profit organization, which has taken over the management.