Humberstone

Humberstone Abandoned mining in northern Chile, an hour's drive from the thriving free port of Iquique, is recognized as valuable. In 2005, UNESCO made this ghost town in the World Heritage List, assigning a scary place the status of an open-nebom.

It all began with the fact that humanity is scared starvation and urged scientists to address the issue of soil fertility. In the first half of the XIX century it became clear that the necessary nitrogen for the growth of the plants do not get air and from the ground, and it should be somehow returned to the field and sady.

The solution was the nitrate, from which for centuries made gunpowder. But it was expensive as long as in 1830 on the border of Chile and Peru have not found abundant saltpeter mines. Layers of the famous Chilean sodium nitrate meter thick matured over the centuries in the Atacama desert, which is never dozhdey.

Nitrate boom of the last century was akin to a gold rush. It was believed that the stocks of ammonium nitrate in Chile exceeds 90 million. M. And this world good enough for almost forever. In 1872, James Thomas Humberstone founded a company that permanently settled in 48 kilometers from the ocean. The town grew as the grass in the udobreniyah.

In search of work here have gathered thousands of miners from Peru, Chile and Bolivia, formed a special cultural oasis, matured in the struggle not only for prosperity, as all of the life in this waterless area. While saltpeter kings built themselves palaces on the banks of the Pacific Ocean and indulged in all sorts of izlishestvam.

Here was their language, their customs and laws, there was so much money that the miners after work shift could afford to go not only to the tavern, but in the theater. In the theater, all perfectly preserved - and the audience and the stage, and zanaves.

His flourishing town of Humberstone reached in the 1930-40 biennium. At that time, as the old economic model has been mired in the Great Depression and nitrogen fertilizers began to be produced by the synthesis of ammonia, Humberstone experienced modernization and escaped bankrotstva.

But the depletion of sodium nitrate led to no good, and in 1958, Chileans turned its production in this field. Suddenly out of work were 3000 miners. Humberstone opustel.