Rosario Mining Company
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The Rosario Mining Company was an American-owned corporation that owned and operated the Rosario mine, a gold and silver producer in central Honduras.
[edit] History
The mountains around Tegucigalpa were largely known to contain gold and silver deposits since Spanish settlement in the area, which led to the area being visited by fortune seekers from Central America and the United States, among other locations.
In 1880, after successful negotiations with the fragile Honduran government, The New York and Honduras Rosario Mining Company was established in the US. The mining firm took a well-known mine in San Juancito, 40 km northeast of Tegucigalpa, and in the next decade produced three million dollars in silver and gold. By the beginning of the 20th century it had more than one thousand workers.[citation needed]
The Rosario had an enormous impact on the local landscape. Entire woods were sacrificed to satisfy the large amount of timber needed to build the underground installations, buildings and houses.[citation needed] Long tracks were opened to transport wagons, carriages, minerals and men.
The Rosario Mining Company was rumoured to be involved in the change of the Honduras capital from Comayagua to its rival city of Tegucigalpa, which is closer to the mine. The then Honduran President, Marco Aurelio Soto, had shares in the firm.[citation needed]
The company reached its peak during the 1920s when more than three thousand miners worked in the mine, and there was an American consulate at El Rosario. The American firm built housing, offices, terraces, tunnels and several routes which cross the mountain region.[citation needed]
Perhaps as a result of the company's involvement in Honduras, the area became the first to have a hydroelectric plant and telegraph built[citation needed], as well as the first Pepsi bottling plant in Central America[citation needed]. The adjacent town of San Juancito had electrical power before the capital city of Tegucigalpa.[citation needed]
Extraction in the mine ceased in 1954, after 75 years, due to a general strike.[citation needed] The intervening half-century allowed the forest to regrow, and much of the Rosario mine workings are now within La Tigra National Park.
