The Marcona Mine in Peru used open pit mining and quickly became one of the company's most lucrative projects. It accelerated production during 1954. MARCONA Meanwhile, in 1952, not long after Littlefield came aboard, Allen Christensen investigated a report of a large iron deposit in Peru. Over a period of months, the Christensen-Littlefield negotiating team entered a partnership with the Cyprus Mines Corporation in Los Angeles and also agreed upon terms with the Peruvian government. "A very significant step was the investment in Marcona," Littlefield related. "This became a highly profitable, large-scale operation." Located on the arid west coast of Peru, the Marcona project required building a town complete with a water system. Company officials liked to joke about the "armada" of ships bringing supplies to the barren coast. "San Juan became a town of about three thousand people," Littlefield recounted. "We provided everything from womb to tomb. We had a hospital. We built housing and provided the schools.... It took a little while to develop a workforce. Many people just took off and quit when they got their first paycheck. They had never seen so much money before." Littlefield added, "Marcona was, from the beginning, highly profitable. Soon Utah's share of Marcona was larger than our profits from other sources. That did not remain the case, but for a while it was really the tail wagging the dog." By 1962 size estimates of the ore reserves rose from 100-million tons to 350-million tons, but the surface ores were diminishing. Adding a beneficiation process to screen the iron-bearing ore from other material allowed Marcona to uphold its standard. Beneficiation facilities, built at San Nicholas Bay, 10 miles north of San Juan, dramatically increased the volume of ore Marcona could export.