El Yeso Dam

This guide to El Yeso Dam in the Andes above Santiago follows the workers, engineers and military mountain specialists who lived in windowless, parabolic concrete shelters called las cascaras between 1953 and 1967, at three thousand meters and thirty degrees below zero. It traces the divide between the housing given to laborers and to engineers, and the six-month working season that stretched the project across fourteen years. It follows what the earthen dam was built to hold back, and why the camp was abandoned once the wall was finished.