Show A visit P isit to the rio tinto copper M mines in S of 0 of S spain pain WRITTEN FOR THE MINING REVIEW BY H B some three years ago it was my fortune to have the opportunity of spending a week in southern spain previously I 1 had lived in old mexico for varying periods which had given me some familiarity with the spanish language I 1 and accustomed accustom ea me to the peculiarities of a people essentially spanish from gibraltar I 1 went by way of rondo and seville stopping a day at each place and had to change cars again at the junction point of nueva niebla for the huelva rio tinto train which runs from huelva to rio tinto huelva is the seaport tributary to the rio tinto mines and the railroad follows the course of the stream from there to the mines the country I 1 passed through on this trip was largely barren and extremely hot bottom land and irrigated tracts furnished about the only vegetation except tracts of cork trees and some immense olive orchards the wind blew from these great olive orchards hot and withering against the cheek about the mines the acid fumes from the roasting beds precludes any vegetation and the hills have a reddish color the country is subject ao to prolonged droutha drout hs which with its semiarid semi arid character is especially favorable to the metallurgical processes of heap roast roasting in g and leaching here results are obtained far surpassing anything possible in countries subject to even moderate rainfall the stream rio tinto which was a deep red with pools of inky blackness down by niebla because of a livid green color long before the train had arrived at rio tinto I 1 going along we went through ough many cuts showing the and slates standing on edge there were also abundant exposures on the hillsides hill sides where the stream bed had cut down the banks 0 A ah A 4 north lode open cast at the rio tinto mine the village of rio tinto was a great surprise for I 1 had rather expected to find a pace resembling a mexican mining camp there were large stores a neat church fountains carefully tended and conveniences veni ence s for garbage disposal unquestionably all this could have been accomplished only by the foreign mine ownership it was also different from anything really spanish most of any time at rio tinto I 1 spent about the workings the great opencast open cast pit with its terraced workings and busy trains claimed my first attention the pit is already some hundreds of feet deep with entrance tunnels and drifts going into the other workings under the great hill men were busy shoveling ore into certain cars and into other cars the waste to go far out on the spread ing in dump steam shovels have more recently considerably re replaced placed this manual labor beyond the great reat pit the immense ore bodies are worked by drift and filling up on top I 1 saw where the capping was being blasted and sent down the shafts to fill and hold the ground as the ore is removed below the pit I 1 found the heap roasting piles the leaching beds the precipitation plant and the some of the roasting beds were circular and nd some long and narrow very little almost no fuel is used to start the roasting and then it proceeds of itself the 6 z uk 9 AV 4 vp dt open air heaps at rio tinto mines or something like many of the unkempt towns in that same country however the way from the station led up a neat and tidy street there were cement walks the houses well built in line and numbered dry climate is very favorable for this operation roasted ore was being removed from the exterior of many of the piles leaving the center core still hot and smoking the leaching beds were huge thick affairs with their tops precisely arranged to run the leaching water from one little banked plot to the next over the whole surface the water percolates through dissolves the copper and collects from below to be run to the precipitation plant there were acres and acres of these beds two years hardly suffice to sufficiently dissolve the copper out of one of them they are said to contain about tons ton s of ore ore each and the company reports usually estimate about tons of copper in reserve in these beds each year in the precipitation plant the copper containing solutions run through long tanks containing pigs of cast iron the iron is gradually dissolved replacing the copper which settles out more or less pure some of the tanks are always being cleaned out while the precipitation is going on in the others the is not large it consists of blast furnaces and converters while almost all of the mechanical equipment that I 1 saw both for railroad and mine was of english manufacture this was installed in 1902 with the furnaces and converters imported complete from the united states big notices were displayed about the grounds and men with shot guns were on guard but said nothing as I 1 passed rio tinto is a mine that has been worked ance history began miles of underground workings left by the ancient phoenicians Phoenicia ns and romans have been found relics burled buried for centuries are sometimes unearthed deep in the ground its present owners secure their engineering talent from america Eu england gland and germany but the labor is spanish pyrite rock is shipped in great abundance to the leading industrial countries fo for its sulphur content copper bearing pyrite is also shipped to lo I 1 the company in wales and to this same place goes all the better grade of the precipitated copper and the converter product for refining each year for a decade the mines have produced about pounds of fine copper to do this a million and a half tons of ore have to be mined the ore averages between 2 and 3 per cent copper in 1900 rio tinto produced about one tenth of the worlds supply since then the united states especially has increased production so enormously that this mine practically stationary in production has lost very mue much a in comparison I 1 in ore reserves rio tinto ranks well to the front a few years ago it was known to have tons in one great mass if we consider the sales of sulphur ore as counting to decrease the cost of the copper 0 no mine of any size can claim to produce copper as cheaply as rio tinto the cost figures somewhat under 6 cents a pound the rio tinto company has net profits of six or seven million dollars a year its shares of par value 25 5 each are quoted at about 26 6 for the preferred and 27 7 for the common murray utah H |