Las Medulas Gold Mines
About
Augustus's engineers tore this mountainside apart to reach its gold, following the region's conquest in the Cantabrian Wars around 25 BCE. They channeled water for miles — a network of more than 300 kilometers of leats and channels, some single runs stretching over 100 kilometers from mountain reservoirs — before releasing it in one collapsing torrent Pliny called ruina montium. Five tons of gold came out of these red cliffs over two centuries of mining. In 117 CE the works were still running at full capacity, decades before exhaustion finally closed them.
What happened here
Work goes on underground by lamplight in shifts, and the lamp is also the clock. Galleries follow the ore, propped with timber, drained by wooden screws and bucket wheels worked by hand in stages up the shaft. Ventilation is a second shaft and a fire to draw the air. The labour is convicts, slaves and paid men working side by side on different terms, and the paid men do the skilled cutting. Above ground the ore is crushed, washed in long channels, and smelted, and the smoke kills the vegetation for miles. Mines of any size are imperial property, leased to contractors under written regulations covering shifts, drainage, bath-house charges and who may open a new gallery. Settlements grow around them fast and empty just as fast.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 33.66–78
The ruina montium in detail — galleries driven in, the hill brought down by its own weight, and water run in from miles off to wash the gold out of the debris.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 33.66-78
- https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/803/
- https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/las-medulas-largest-roman-gold-mine.html
Nearby
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