We took a drive north to a fascinating mining museum said to be the oldest in the world and spent the whole day exploring the mine and the area affected by it. The sheer size of the area mined was unimagineable; the ravaged and unrepairable landscape was shocking; the history and technology was fascinating but the overall image was of devastation, despite it once being a thriving community and business. We can honestly say this was an awe inspiring place, eerie and shocking, sad yet beautiful, colourful and yet disasterous.

We first visited the Museum (originally the former hospital of the Rio Tinto Company and built in 1927) now housing information and exhibits that showed that mining had been carried out in the area since the copper age (5000 years ago), through the bronze age, iron age and finally the roman age where there is evidence of the first period of industrialisation. The British arrival in the late 1870s brought a massive step forward in production and technology, as well as a creation of a town to house its workers right up to the 1960s.

In the museum is a Type N crane, unique in Spain, manufactured in 1930, it was used to help in derailments and accidents on the railway. Also on display is a Tyke K Locomotive, manufactured in 1908 by the North British Locomotive and one of 142 steam engines originally owned by the Rio Tinto Company, all imported by the British. The carriage behind was called The Maharajah’s Carriage, built in 1892 for Queen Victoria’s trip to India and brought to Rio Tinto for a visit by King Alphonso XIII.

The area is rich in sulphide deposits, created by a massive under ocean volcanic eruption 300 million years ago. Silver, copper and sulphur were mined through to the early 19^th century by very rustic methods (men, pick axes and donkeys) resulting in little output, many accidents and the lack of efficient transportation meant the ores would reach Seville by donkey and wagon some 5 days later, therefore making little profit for the company running it at the time. From 1883 through to 1953 the Rio Tinto Company was created by two British mining companies and took over production and extraction flourished; they introduced open cast mining, improving pillars and supports to underground tunnels and created a railway line to the port of Huelva which was only a 5 hour journey.

The Rio Tinto river seeps through permeable rocks to fill the open casts; the colour of the water is a deep red, a result of 6 to 8 grams of heavy metals and sulphur per litre with a ph of 2.2. The water is poisonous, has no life other than micro organisms that have adapted to the minerals and metals in the water but has been found to be of health benefit to people suffering with skin conditions. The Rio Tinto was not polluted by the mining activities, it has always flown red and acidic into the Atlantic Ocean. At some points it turns yellow where river tributaries join and carrying different minerals this changes the water acidity for a while.

The area alongside part of the River has been used as a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of tons of smelting slags, some solidified to the shape of the buckets it was dumped from.

The yellow soil alongside the river is created by unburned sulphur; in this mine iron pyrites are the most sulphurous in the world and the burning of the pyrites caused a dense fog of sulphur dioxide, thereby creating an acid rain which has subsequently changed the soil’s ph. Nothing will ever grow in this area again and the area resembles the surface of Mars; NASA has been studying the soil and trying to establish similarities between this landscape and that on Mars.

The train journey along 12km of track was littered with old houses and mills, Roman roads, steam machinery, signal boxes, remains of brick built hoppers, a cementation plant, mineral washing plants and several stations. The original 83 km line was built in two years, started at five different locations and linked together the mine to the port of Huelva, at a cost of £105 million pounds, in 1873 – 1875!! The line and its wooden carriages was also used by workers to travel to and from work in local towns and hamlets. At one point, 20,000 people were employed here, now it is just a tourist attraction.

Next we visited the Town called Bella Vista created by the Rio Tinto Company in the 1880s; a manager decided that he needed to house his workers nearby and built firstly a row of houses in a smart area, then followed a small village, all overlooking an area of woodland and rolling scenery. Part of the community included leisure facilities, such as a cricket green and pavilion, tennis courts, swimming pool, church and a school. Read the description (and translation) outside the church!!! As you enter the village you immediately see a row of very British houses and one (no 21) remains as a museum, showing how the middle manager and his family woud have lived.

Lastly, we visited an actual open cast mine, last mined in 1960 but originally dug by the Romans. We accessed the edge of the mine through a 200m tunnel where we saw the original access tunnel leading down to shafts where the ores were extracted, an emergency exit (wooden ladder) in case the lift wasn’t working, and chimneys where the steam from the locomotives used to transport minerals escaped. The ceiling was reinforced by beams of eucalyptus and pine (woods that are flexible and creak when they’re about to break, warning the miners before the tunnel collapses). The cast itself is 50m from the top to the water level, 150m wide and 350m long, with a depth of 35m. The colour of the water was a deep blue with a red tinge and the colours on the edges of the walls were red, yellow, purple, grey and white, showing all the different minerals that still bleed through.

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