New Cornelia mine

Rank in Arizona: #308of 727 ranked
Overall score: Score 41.5 out of 100medium confidence
Category: Historic Site

The New Cornelia mine is an inactive open-pit copper mine in Pima County, Arizona, just outside the town of Ajo, which was built as a company town to serve it. It was the only productive mine in the Ajo mining district. The roughly circular pit measures a mile and a half across at its widest point and is 1,100 feet deep at the centre. The New Cornelia Mine Tailings, though not generally regarded as a dam, is often cited as the largest dam structure in the United States, with a volume of 7.4 billion cubic feet.

Where it is

New Cornelia mine is a historic site near Ajo, in Pima County. It is one of the historic sites in this database, and appears in the statewide ranking of Arizona attractions.

How this ranking was reached

No official visitor count is published for New Cornelia mine, so its score rests on public interest and tourism significance, and is capped below the level a measured attraction can reach. That is why the medium confidence above is not higher. The weighting is explained in full on the methodology page, and every axis is broken out under Facts and sources at the foot of this page.

Note on the data: No official visitor count is published for this attraction.

Sources

Public interest: Wikimedia pageviews (en.wikipedia, human traffic), 2024
Coordinates and designations: Wikidata(opens in a new tab)
County: U.S. Census geography via FCC Area API, resolved from coordinates

Record last verified 2026-08-12.

More photographs

Public domain · source(opens in a new tab)
Corey Taratuta, CC BY 2.0 · licence(opens in a new tab) · source(opens in a new tab)

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