The state of mining in South America – an overview. Mining Weekly.
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South America: home of the greatest, most alluring, most deadly of mining legends – the myth of El Dorado, the golden one. Over the past 500 years, the con-tinent’s mineral riches, real and imagined, have stimulated amazing feats of courage, daring and endurance, conquest, looting, terrible atrocities and appalling oppression.
From the Victorian era on, mining also resulted in what are still breath-taking engineering feats, such as railways through the mighty Andes mountains, complete with chasm-spanning bridges and impressive tunnels. Mining has helped promote at least some economic and infrastructural development in a number of countries, although this has tended to be uneven.