The Española project is located in the south portion of Candelaria-Punta del Cobre district, 2.5 kilometres southwest from the Candelaria open pit. It occurs in the contact aureole between the Copiapó batholith and sedimentary and volcano-sedimentary rocks of the Chañarcillo Group and the Punta del Cobre Formation in a tectonically depressed block controlled by San Gregorio fault system . The copper mineralization (oxides, sulphides and mixed) is hosted mainly in brown garnet skarn levels and in quartz hornfels in the upper part of the stratigraphic sequence (Abundancia Formation) with mantos characteristic.

The main lithological types on surface are assigned to the Abundancia Formation and were affected by different metamorphic processes during emplacement of the Copiapó batholith. In the eastern portion of the area, there is a fault contact with the volcanic and volcanoclastic rocks of the Punta del Cobre Formation.

The copper-gold sulphide mineralization found at the Candelaria Copper Mining Complex is generally referred to as iron-oxide copper gold (IOCG) mineralization.

In the Española project area, the primary dominant copper sulphide is chalcopyrite found as clustersand in disseminated form commonly associated withbrown garnet porphyroblasts. Gangue minerals are pyrite and iron oxides (magnetite-hematite). Nearthe surface and down to a depth of approximately 70, the mineralization is oxidized, characterized by the presence of chrys ........

The Española project is a new addition to the Mineral Reserves in the Candelaria District. The deposit will be exploited using open pit mining methods similar to those currently applied at the Candelaria open pit.

The Española project is considered to contain medium to low grade ore. Its most important contribution to the mining plan will be associated with the replacement of ore from low-grade stockpiles previously scheduled for processing.

The ore extraction rate will be variable. For the purposes of pit optimization, a mining rate of 45 kilotonnes per day was assumed at Española.

Primary loading units in ore and waste will be Caterpillar 6040 and 6020 backhoes.

The current Española project design parameters:

•Bench face angle BFA: 70 degrees.
•Inter-ramp ISA gap angle: 48 degrees.
•Width of BW berm: 8.6metres.
•Bench Height: 16metres.
•Ramp width: 35 metres.

Ore from the Española open pit will be transported to the Candelaria processing plant.

Minera Candelaria operates a conventional process plant flowsheet that incorporates crushing, two parallel lines of grinding and flotation with final concentrate filtration and shipping of bulk copper concentrates. Process water is reclaimed from the tailings storage facility after thickening.

Run-of-mine ore is trucked to aprimary gyratory crusher. The crushed product is transported using an overland conveyor belt to a coarse ore stockpile with a combined live and dead capacity of 500,000 tonnes. Semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mills are followed by pebble crushing, with separate grinding of a portion of the crushed pebbles and the remainder brought back to the SAG mills. This circuit is followed by closed-circuit ball milling with hydrocyclones to classify the flotation feed size.

A multi-stage flotation circuit using an arrangement of mechanical cells, regrind mill ........