Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works
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How it came to be
The Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works are two former refineries in one of the driest deserts on Earth, about 45 km from the port of Iquique in northern Chile. In 1872, when the area still belonged to Peru, the company of the Lima-born Guillermo Wendell founded Santa Laura, and the Peru Nitrate Company founded La Palma, later Humberstone.
From 1880, for more than 60 years, thousands of workers from Chile, Peru and Bolivia turned the world's largest saltpeter deposit into sodium nitrate, a fertiliser that transformed farmland in the Americas and Europe and made Chile rich. Living in company towns, these workers, the pampinos, built a communal culture known for its own language, its solidarity and its early struggles for social justice. At their peak the two towns housed about 4,000 people.
The Great Depression of 1929 and the spread of synthetic fertiliser broke the industry, and in 1934 La Palma was renamed Oficina Santiago Humberstone. Both works were abandoned in 1960 and declared national monuments in 1970, though dismantling and looting continued. They were inscribed in 2005 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger the same year, then removed from it in 2019 after restoration work.
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