Catamutún is a coal mine and locality in

Los Ríos Region The Los Ríos Region (Spanish: ''Región de Los Ríos'', , ''Region of the Rivers'') is one of Chile's 16 regions, the country's first-order administrative divisions. Its capital is Valdivia. It began to operate as a region on October 2, 2007 ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

.Catamutún: el negocio de la cal agrícola
, ''El Austral: El Diario de Osorno''. Catamutún is located 25 km away from the city of La Unión. Coal has been mined in Los Ríos Region since the 1930s and Catamutún begun in 1945 to be exploited by ''Compañía Carbonífera San Pedro de Catamutún'', an enterprise which has since then expanded into

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...

mining.Descubriendo la Tradición Carbonífera en la Región de Los Ríos
/ref> The Catamutún mine complex was as of 1990 made up of three individual mine where the same coal bed was mined. The mines were San Pedro, Antihual and Bandurrias. The exploited coal bed is divided into an upper and lower bed by a small light grey claystone bed. There are only few faults in the beds. The coal bed belongs to either or Cheuquemó Formation or Estratos de Pupunahue. ENAP geologists have instead named "Osorno Formation" the coal-bearing formation and estimated a

Serravallian The Serravallian is, in the geologic timescale, an age or a stage in the middle Miocene Epoch/Series, which spans the time between 13.82 Ma and 11.63 Ma (million years ago). The Serravallian follows the Langhian and is followed by the Tortonian ...

age for the marine strata that overlie the coal beds. Mining is facilitated by the lack of any significant fault displacement of the coal beds. The coal of Catamutún are

sub-bituminous Sub-bituminous coal is a lower grade of coal that contains 35–45% carbon. The properties of this type are between those of lignite, the lowest grade of coal, and those of bituminous coal, the second-highest grade of coal. Sub-bituminous coal i ...

, low in sulfur and of heat contents of 5,800–6,150

Kcal The calorie is a unit of energy. For historical reasons, two main definitions of "calorie" are in wide use. The large calorie, food calorie, or kilogram calorie was originally defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of o ...

/kg. Early mentions of coal near Catamutún include a description by

Rodolfo Amando Philippi Rodolfo Amando (or Rudolph Amandus) Philippi (14 September 1808 – 23 July 1904) was a German–Chilean paleontologist and zoologist. Philippi contributed primarily to malacology and paleontology. His grandson, Rodulfo Amando Philippi Bañados ( ...

in 1851 and a passage in

Vicente Pérez Rosales Vicente Pérez Rosales (; 5 April 1807 – 6 September 1886) was a politician, traveller, merchant, miner and Chilean diplomat that organised the colonisation by Germans and Chileans of the Llanquihue area. Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park ...

' book '' Recuerdos del pasado'' in 1855. Mining explorations were performed by private individuals in 1873 and by

public works Public works are a broad category of infrastructure projects, financed and constructed by the government, for recreational, employment, and health and safety uses in the greater community. They include public buildings ( municipal buildings, sc ...

in 1908. In 1945 Catamutún begun to be exploited by ''Compañía Carbonífera San Pedro de Catamutún''. Mining was done using

room and pillar Room and pillar or pillar and stall is a variant of breast stoping. It is a mining system in which the mined material is extracted across a horizontal plane, creating horizontal arrays of rooms and pillars. To do this, "rooms" of ore are dug out ...

and the longwall mining systems depending on the local conditions. The introduction of longwall mining improved the recovery rates of the mines. Miners lived initially in a

mining camp Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic via ...

the Catamutún area. Conditions in the mining cominity were precarious, particularly for children, which led social workers and the mining company to create saving accounts to finance a housing project. so that workers moved in the late 1980s to the new Miraflores neighborhood in city of La Unión. La Unión, a city with better services and schooling opportunities, became thus a dormitory town for miners. Most miners had a peasant background, which they retained after they begun to work in the mines. Example of this are the leave request miners did in order to be able to sow or harvest

potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...

es, or the fact that miners spent their free time in their farms rather than together with other miners. Mining in Catamutún ceased in the late 1990s. Until that point Catamutún had been the only coal mine in Los Ríos Region and Los Lagos Region in continuous operations from the 1940s. Some workers were transferred by the company to the Mulpún mine where mining continued until 2001.

Notes

References

Coal mines in Chile Geography of Los Ríos Region Mines in Los Ríos Region Populated places in Ranco Province Underground mines in Chile Former mines in Chile {{Mining-stub