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Natural resource endowment is a necessary but insufficient condition to explain the formation of a durable mining city. This article focuses on the dynamic and endogenous factors that give rise to increasing returns to scale as a key element in understanding the formation and sustainability of this type of urban agglomeration. It is also necessary to consider historical perspectives to overcome the limitations of location theory and the "new" economic geography. A classification of mining centers is proposed and the mining city of Antofagasta, Chile is analyzed accordingly. The focus is on the period between 1866 and 1878, which saw the consolidation of the path-dependent process that gave rise to one of the leading mining cities in the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]