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@ Anarko
2025-02-25 14:23:41
🌊 SURF 'N TURF 🏝️
-THE BITCOIN BORACAY ISLAND LIFE-
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Las Médulas: all that is left of the largest gold mine in the Roman Empire.
Las Médulas is a Roman mining area located in the Autonomous community of Castile and León, in a mountainous zone in the Northwest of Spain.
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In the 1st century AD, the Roman Imperial authorities began to exploit the gold deposits of this region, using a technique based on hydraulic power.
After two centuries of working the deposits, the Romans withdrew, leaving a devastated landscape. Since there was no subsequent industrial activity, the dramatic traces of this remarkable ancient technology are visible everywhere as sheer faces in the mountainsides and vast areas of tailings, now used for agriculture.
The area inscribed on the World Heritage List, the Archaeological Zone of Las Médulas, covers over 2000 ha.
It comprises the mines themselves and also large areas covered by the tailings resulting from the process.
There are dams which used to collect the vast amounts of water needed for the mining process and intricate canals through which the water was conveyed to the mines.
There are villages of both the indigenous inhabitants and the Imperial administrative and support personnel (including army units), as well as one major Roman road and a large number of minor routes, used during mining operations.
The mining process, known to Pliny as ruina montium, made use of the immense power of large bodies of water.
Water from springs, rain and melting snow was collected in large reservoirs, connected to the mines by a system of well-built gravity canals over long distances.
They were cut into the sterile strata, many metres deep, over the layers of auriferous conglomerate.
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When the sluices of the dams were opened, enormous quantities of water flowed into the canals, which were closed at their ends.
The pressure thus built up caused the rock to explode and be washed away by the water, forming enormous areas of tailings, several kilometres in length.
The process is vividly apparent on the working face at the main Las Médulas site, where the half-sections of the galleries used for the last operation there stand out against the sheer rock face.
The layers of the auriferous conglomerate were broken up in the same way, but the friable conglomerate was run through washing channels, the heavy gold particles falling to the bottom of the channels.
The non-metallic part escaped to the layers of sterile tailings.
The large boulders resulting from this process were removed by hand, as the neat heaps scattered around the landscape demonstrate.
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