Sewell

I had driven through the Central Valley for days chasing wine and sleepy plaza towns, and I was not prepared for Sewell. It sits at around 2,000 metres on a slope so steep that when the American copper company built it in 1905 they simply gave up on streets and built the entire town around a central staircase. You park at the bottom, the guide hands you a hard hat, and then you climb. Lia counted the first hundred steps out loud and then stopped, conserving oxygen.

The City of Stairs

Sewell exists because of El Teniente, which is still the largest underground copper mine on earth, a labyrinth of tunnels burrowed into the mountain directly behind the town. For most of the twentieth century thousands of miners and their families lived here, stacked vertically in wooden buildings painted in yellows, reds, and greens — colours chosen, the guide told me, because a grey town under six months of snow each year would drive anyone mad. By the 1970s the company decided it was cheaper to bus workers up daily from Rancagua, and Sewell was emptied and very nearly demolished. UNESCO eventually intervened in 2006, which is the only reason I was standing there at all.

What strikes you is the silence. A town built for fifteen thousand people, and now the only sound is wind through the gaps in the boards and the distant industrial hum of the mine, which never stopped working. You can only visit on an organised tour, which I usually resent, but here it makes sense — this is active mining concession land, and the bus from Rancagua winds up a private road past checkpoints and ore trains.

Inside the Boxes

The restored buildings hold small museums now. The old industrial school has a mineralogy collection that I expected to skim and instead spent an hour in, turning lumps of malachite and chalcopyrite over in my hands. There is a recreated company store, a bowling alley, the markings of a town that tried very hard to be a real place at the edge of the habitable world. I kept thinking about the children who grew up here, sledding down staircases in winter, knowing no horizon that wasn’t vertical.

Lia found a black-and-white photograph of a wedding party crowded onto one of the landings, everyone leaning at the same slight angle the slope imposes, and we stood looking at it for a long time. There is something about a place built with that much stubbornness and then walked away from that lodges in you.

Getting There and Back Down

The tour leaves from Rancagua, about an hour and a half south of Santiago on the highway, and takes most of a day. Bring warm layers regardless of the season — the altitude does what it likes, and we had sun, sleet, and sun again inside three hours. Eat the simple miners’ lunch they serve up top; it is hot, enormous, and exactly right after all those stairs.

When to go: September through April for the most reliable access. The road can close after heavy snow in winter, and tours don’t run every day, so book ahead rather than turning up in Rancagua hopeful, as I nearly did.