Road Tunnels in Chile — Complete List by Length

• 33entries listed
• 4.53 kmlongest bore
• 1910–2009openings span
• 41.55 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 33 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Chile, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 33 rows for Chile are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2009 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Chile are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 142 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 31.9 times the shortest and 5.7 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Dated entries run from 1910 to 2009, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 15 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 33 rows and records State, Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening and Region for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

A new scheme in Chile would have to beat 4.53 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. Eighth on the list is Chacabuco at 2.05 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for Chile in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The date of opening column runs from 5 to 2005 across 23 dated rows, and the 1910s alone account for 6 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

Reading the figures

Dates for Chile refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1910 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 41.55 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Roughly 15 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 17 distinct places and structures — Polvora, Central and Quebrada among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 19 distinct opening years across 99 years, and the median opening year is 1996. Read down the length (m) column, the 33 values run from 142 m to 4 528 m with a midpoint at 793 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The dated entries fall across 19 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes. The tunnel column names 33 distinct entries on this page, Las Raices and Rio Mapocho among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The material on this page is held in 15 captions rather than in running text, 110 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Chile.