Company town: keeping a copper-mining village's history alive at 2,120 meters.(Econtourism)

Standing halfway up the steep walkway at Camp Sewell, the tiny mining town known as the birthplace of the Chilean copper industry, it's easy to see why, early on, people never came down. Above you is only sheer blue sky, deep-brown rock and melting patches of snow, below is grinding machinery. A tiny ribbon of road winds through switchbacks, down 2,120 meters to sea level.

Black grates in hillside crevices hold back snow, to ward off avalanches. Bright green retention ponds, full of copper ore, dot the few level spots carved from the hillsides. Rancangua, the nearest town, might as well not exist. In the first days of the mine's history in 1905, the miners, mostly Chileans, and the U.S. founders and their managers didn't come down the mountain unless they had to: It was a five-hour train ride.

Owned since the mid-1960s by the Chilean state, the upper camp at El Teniente, as the larger mine is known, is an oddity as well as an historic landmark. It's one of the few mines in the world that is effectively a hollowing-out of a mountain. The mountain has 2,200 kilometers of tunnels, of which nearly 800 kilometers are still mined. Copper-bearing ore tumbles down by the force of gravity through chutes inside the hill. An enormous industrial elevator, a metal platform the size of a tennis court, moves work shifts from floor to floor inside the mountain.

Rolando Torrijos spent 18 years at Corporacion del Cobre de Chile (Codelco) as a project inspector, beginning his career at Sewell in 1962 when nearly everyone still lived up the hill in the camp. "There was a movie house, a club for the workers, a club for managers. Bowling. Basketball," says Torrijos. "It was a very civilized life. Personally, I enjoyed it." From a distance, it looks like a ski resort, nestled in the rock face; closer up, it's easier to see the hard work that goes on, as miners trudge up and down the "city of stairs," as Sewell is known. Today, everyone but a few contractors lives in Rancangua. Keeping El Teniente productive is plenty enough for a man like Felipe Ravinet, chief architect at the mine. But he's not so busy that he doesn't have time for his hobby, which is preserving Camp Sewell. In 1997 Codelco began a project to clean up a smelting area down the mountain from Sewell. Knowing that the mine would be abandoned during the cleanup, Ravinet decided to start the slow work of recovering Sewell's history.

The result is an eerie slice of time travel. Some of the buildings are brightly repainted and cleaned. Furniture and fixtures--all made by hand and dating back to the mine's beginnings--are restored. A former industrial school is now a museum.

A bowling alley has all the look and feel of its origins, even the manually set pins. The walls are adorned with period photos of miners and their wives and kids. One photo shows a Fourth of July event, with U.S. flags and bunting. Another shows a liquor smuggler, whose ample sweater allowed for the concealment of off-limits agua ardiente. Singing groups from the RCA Victor label came to entertain, and the dinner club was formal dress. In 1963, Camp Sewell sent seven bowlers to a championship in Mexico.

Wine country. Farther up the hill, barracks exteriors are painted, too, the greens and reds that make up for the overwhelming winter colors of snow white and sky blue, but the interiors are still neglected. Codelco will spend US$250,000 a year on restoration over 10 years. The goal is to rebuild the entire town.

"This is the first stage," says Ravinet. "We're going to recreate living space. We're going to rebuild an area of heavy machinery." Fifteen thousand visitors come a year now, a number Ravinet hopes to push up to 100,000. The idea, he says, is to attract visitors already in the area for popular wine country tours.

Nostalgia tourism seems to be hitting a peak in Chile. The old fertilizer mines in the far north are nearly undisturbed, thanks to the dry desert air. Once manmade chemical nitrates were created--it's used in gunpowder--the saltpeter market collapsed. The port of Valparaiso is undergoing a major facelift, the hand-built wooden churches of Chiloe are being preserved, and the government is talking up tours of collapsed coal towns like Lota.

How much of this turns into big tourism dollars remains to be seen, but that's beside the point. Tourism is being employed as a good reason to preserve. "It's a sensibility," Ravinet says of his quest. "If you're an architect, you can't just let things fall apart."

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