Chacabuco office. Antofagasta - CHILE

Saltpeter Office "Chacabuco" was built in the late 1924 by Lautaro Nitrate Company. This is the last establishment calichera implemented by the traditional Schanks and the largest of its kind. During the building "Chacabuco", the Guggenheim brothers already experimenting with the method of manufacture that bears his name, on which were all the hopes of the industry in a time of falling prices, competition from synthetic The lower yields were seriously affecting the.

The Office "Chacabuco" occupies an area of 36 hectares, and comprises a purely productive sector and one urban. It was equipped with machinery capable of producing 15 metric tons of nitrate per month. In the industrial sector highlights the petty, the winery, the powerhouse and the huge structure is supported by a forest of enormous pillars which housed the 54 large ore leach tanks.

"Chacabuco" stands out among the offices with its complete system Schanks urban facilities. Indeed, the setting is a city in shape, equipped with all facilities necessary to accommodate a population that skirted the 5 thousand people: hospital, theater, hotel, school, shop, market, gym, pool, soccer fields, and the tree-lined square kiosk equipped with a tattoo. Great interest the homes of the workers, lined up on a continuous basis, generally built of adobe. The Citadel is organized according to a checkerboard layout, crossed by wide streets. The monument includes the huge cakes of gravel where debris accumulated minerals.

Technological obsolescence, and especially the Great Depression prevented that from the standpoint of profitability Office "Chacabuco" make great fruit. The Office permanently paralyzed tasks in 1940. More recently, the Office has received a hearty plundering. Fortunately, its basic structures remain and are an invaluable testimony to the strenuous life on the nitrate pampa.

Unfortunately, Chacabuco quedó4 exposed to the systematic dismantling of their facilities. This serious situation aroused some concrete initiatives, including sponsorship, which gave the German Embassy and the Goethe Institute in Santiago for a first stage of conservation of office, which included resturación Theater.



In 1989 he extended the declaration of these nitrate to protect gravel cakes (DS 0536, of 07/11/1989).