Las mines Medulas, Castile and Leon

Las mines Medulas - details and images

In northwestern Spain is a strange rock formation carved golden sandstone. A carpet of green chestnut trees and jagged rocks gives the impression that lofty towers were carved by the forces of nature. Only occasional zărirea reveal any ancient secret tunnel openings. Here in the place called Las Medulas now, was once the largest gold mine of the Roman Empire.

Emperor Augustus wanted a stable economy and the dinar and silver coins that were aureus could grease the wheels for the Roman trade. Enough coins to beat, he would of course need gold and silver. When, eventually, legions have subjugated the northwestern part of Spain, not long before the beginning of our era, they have discovered new gold deposits. But the precious metal was buried in alluvial deposits mountain, which do not easily surrendered. They had to pass two and a half centuries of toil and sweat to reveal hidden treasure.

Their plan to extract gold was to wash the mountain slowly. To achieve its objective, the Romans built 50 channels and several large pools dug up in the mountains and hundreds of miles of tunnels.
Once the network of tunnels was built to one side of the mountain, water engineers flooded the tunnels at high pressure. Tons of ground water displace anger. Gold rock and sand were washed into the mountain, where gold could be separated from sand by washing and sieving. Then repeat the same process as the construction of other tunnels.

The Romans gradually extracted 800 tons of gold in Las Medulas. To get around this amount of gold, thousands of workers actually have urnit mountains, more than 240 million cubic meters of earth. And every ten tons of earth that we excavated get 30 grams of gold.

Today remained only rough rocks of the mountain tunnels and broken ground covered with erosion and chestnut forests. Paradoxically, sweet chestnut that brought the Romans in Spain have proved more durable than gold.

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