Sewell, the city of stairs

A painted mining town with a staircase instead of streets

Sewell clings to the bare slopes of the Andes at 2,000 to 2,250 m, about 60 km east of Rancagua, above El Teniente, the largest underground copper mine in the world. In 1905 the Chilean government authorised the American mining engineer William Braden to work the deposit, and his Braden Copper Company built a concentrator, camps and a narrow-gauge railway climbing 1,500 m from Rancagua, finished in 1911. The town took the name of the company's first president, Barton Sewell. It was the first copper company town in Chile.

The ground was too steep for wheels, and no cars ever ran in the town. It grew around a great central staircase rising from the railway station, with small irregular squares planted with trees along the way, and side stairs and paths branching off to the levels above and below. It is known as the City of Stairs. The buildings are timber, painted green, yellow, red and blue, with homes on the upper floors and shops and services at street level. Single men first lived in shared barracks called colectivos, and family housing, playgrounds, a cinema, a hospital, a fire station and a social club followed. Every supply came up by rail. At its height, around the 1960s, between 15,000 and 16,000 people lived here, and former residents and their descendants still keep a culture that blended Chilean and American ways.

Life on the mountain was hard. On 8 August 1944 an avalanche from the slopes above killed 102 people. In June 1945 smoke from a fire outside spread through the mine and killed 355 workers with carbon monoxide, the disaster remembered as the Smoke Tragedy, which pushed the government to adopt new safety rules.

The Chilean state bought a 51 percent stake in 1967 and began moving families down to Rancagua along the new Copper Highway, and in 1971 the Allende government nationalised the mine. From 1977 the state company CODELCO cleared more families out and began demolishing buildings, until supporters won a halt at the end of the 1980s. The American staff's detached houses are all gone.

The protected core covers 17.2 hectares, with 38 percent of the housing and 80 percent of the industrial buildings, including the concentrator, which still works. Chile made Sewell a national monument in 1998, and UNESCO listed it in 2006. Nobody lives there now. The town is closed to private cars, and visitors come only with tour operators from Santiago and Rancagua; one building houses a museum of mining history.