Tap a sentence to see it in Spanish, and tap the book to study it. The speaker plays one sentence, the round button plays a paragraph, and the player at the bottom reads the whole story. Press T to show or hide every translation.
On 5 August 2010 , part of the San José mine collapsed . The mine , which produced copper and gold , lies in the Atacama Desert near the city of Copiapó . Thirty - three miners were deep inside , about 700 metres below the surface . For seventeen days nobody knew whether they were alive . Teams drilled narrow holes through the rock , hoping to reach the men . On 22 August a drill came back up with a note taped to it . It said : " We are fine in the shelter , the 33 . " Soon food , water and letters were travelling down the small holes . Feeding the men was one problem ; bringing them up was a much harder one . Three large drills worked at the same time , each trying a different route . The fastest one broke through in early October . Its shaft was about 620 metres long , went down at a steep angle and was around 70 centimetres wide . Engineers of the Chilean Navy designed a capsule for this shaft , with advice from NASA . They called it Fénix , which means " phoenix " , the bird that rises again . It was only 54 centimetres wide , so a miner had to stand straight inside it . It carried oxygen , a harness , and a link for voice and video , and it had a door at the bottom for emergencies . The rescue began on the night of 12 October . Rescuers went down first to help the miners . Just after midnight , Florencio Ávalos became the first man to reach the surface . Each ride took about fifteen minutes . About twenty - two hours after the rescue began , the shift leader , Luis Urzúa , came up last . He had spent 69 days underground with his men . Since then , the capsule has travelled to museums . A note brought the world good news , and a narrow capsule brought every one of the 33 men home . 
