Chiflon del Diablo Mine

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Not far from Conception is a small town named Lota. Since 1850 there has been a coal mine where Ramiro’s maternal great grandfather worked as a company doctor.
It was at this mine, where the movie Terrafundo was filmed.

The mine is open for visitors for an underground tour. We’re lucky, the next tour is ten minutes from the time we arrive.
We buy our tickets and join the rest of the group in the equipment room where we are fitted with a battery pack and hard hat with a miners lamp. Both the battery pack and the hard hat are quite heavy. We will be carrying this for a good hour.
 Our guide, a handsome young man, tells us about the mine, which is the only undersea mine in the world. It was shut down in the late 1990s
The mine is called Chifon de Diablo. It was named such because often the miners would see flames appear, which killed many miners. They claimed was the devil.

The young man himself, his father and grandfather were all miners. It was an extremely hard life. They worked seven days a week, and every day before they reached their work space in the mine shaft, they had to crawl through a seven kilometer long tunnel, only one meter high. It took them two hours to reach the work space and for this “commuting” time they did not get paid. Often they took their sons with them who helped with small jobs. One of those jobs was to open a gate in the tunnel, which allowed deadly gases to escape into the tunnel leading to a chimney. I had heard before how they would use canaries in the mines. If the canary passed out, it meant there was deadly gas present.

The young boys were tied down with a long rope, so that when their mine lamp would go out, they would not wander around in the dark and get lost.

We enter a small cage, which serves as an elevator. It takes us down into the mine. I try not to listen when the  guide tells us how deep we are going and close my eyes until the elevator comes to a stop.
I remember Ramiro’s cousins telling us earlier about the 5.5 earthquake yesterday, while we were on the road. Every time my mind drifts off to the possibility of an earthquake, I force myself to focus on something else and pay close attention to the words of the guide, who speaks so fast, I can only hear part of it. Whenever there is a moment, Ramiro explains some of the details.

We walk to various tunnels in the mine and get a - just pretend - turn to try out the drill used to loosen the coal. We crawl through a narrow tunnel, the floor is wet and slippery. In the early days, miners went in without hard hat, shirt or shoes. I imagine what that would have been like.

Our ticket includes a visit to the museum, which served as the doctors house. It is quite an experience for Ramiro to walk on the floor, his great grandfather and his family once walked. There is a library with thick books; The records of the mine. Unfortunately we do not have access to any of these books, but we have  a feeling there is a piece of the puzzle which links Ramiro to this town and the Sumaran family. There is even a possibility his great grandfather is on one of the many pictures on the walls.

For a small town such as this, Lota has a beautiful park which once belonged to the Causiño family, who build a castle on the land and brought in over 350 spices of trees from all over the worlds.
We learn a lot about Lota from the young lady who is dressed in traditional costume and leads  us through the park.

When Mister Causiño died, his wife donated a lot of money to the community and built the first school a theatre and provided other public services.

In the early 60s the entire family died of Tuberculoses and in the early 70s the castle was destroyed by an earthquake.

The park still has a number of buildings including a greenhouse, built in the late 1800 and still in very good shape. In order to keep the temperature high inside throughout the year, fires were built inside.

There is still one more thing Ramiro want to do. A visit to the cemetery in the hope he will see the family name. But with the hundreds of mausoleums and tombstones it is impossible to find anything.

When we get back to the house after picking up some groceries for the evening , cousin Aide from Montreal has arrived. What a busy place. Nena’s daughter Tanya is also in town and ends up sleeping with Nena.