Almadén

Overview

The Parque Minero de Almadén is a decommissioned mercury mine in the south-west of Ciudad Real province, opened to the public in 2006 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2012 together with Idrija in Slovenia under the title Heritage of Mercury. You come for one thing: a guided walk through a 17th and 18th century gallery about a kilometre and a half long, which the operator describes as the only authentic historic mine in Spain open to visitors.

Everything above ground follows from what is below it. Almadén sits on the largest known mercury deposit on Earth, worked since at least the 3rd century BCE, and roughly 250,000 tonnes of the metal have come out of it over about two thousand years. The name is Arabic, al-maʻdin, meaning the mine or the place where metal is dug.

The town that grew on top is small and getting smaller: 4,855 residents across a 239.64 km² municipality at 589 metres, in the western foothills of the Sierra Morena. Two 18th-century buildings on the surface are worth as much of your time as the tunnels. The Real Hospital de Mineros de San Rafael, founded in 1752, treated miners and their families until the late 20th century and was one of Europe’s first institutions built around occupational health. The bullring, begun the same year, is hexagonal, which makes it unique, and it now holds the tourist office along with an exhibition space, a restaurant and a hotel.

Plan on half a day for the standard mine visit and the hospital, or a full day if you take the extended tour. The underground temperature is constant and the humidity is noticeable, so what happens on the surface in August has no bearing on what you wear below.

History

Cinnabar, the ore that yields mercury, has been dug out of the Almadén syncline since antiquity. Under Rome and the Visigoths the likely end product was vermilion, the red pigment ground from the raw mineral rather than the metal itself. That changed in the Islamic period, when furnaces capable of driving mercury out of the ore were installed and the mines began exporting across the Mediterranean basin, with enough standing to be written up in the scholarly literature of al-Andalus.

Alfonso VII took the district in 1151, and in 1168 Alfonso VIII handed the territory, together with the Castilseras estate the mining park still uses for its ecotourism programmes, to the Order of Calatrava, which leased the workings out to private operators.

The Fugger banking family of Augsburg took over administration in the 16th century, against loans made to the Spanish Crown, and their timing was extraordinary. Amalgamation, the process that uses mercury to pull silver and gold out of crushed ore, arrived in the Americas in the mid-16th century and demand went vertical. Most of what Almadén produced went to Seville and from there across the Atlantic.

Nobody wanted the work. After the Fuggers missed their production quota in 1566, the king agreed to send 30 prisoners to serve their sentences underground, and the first forzados reached Almadén at the end of February that year; the number rose to 40 in 1583. They were picked from men waiting in the Toledo jail for transport to the galleys, usually those with fixed sentences and decent physical condition. Murderers were rarely chosen, because the galleys counted as the harsher punishment.

Enslaved people, mostly taken from North Africa, were bought to work beside the convicts. Slaveholders sold on those they considered least desirable, which meant they came cheap, because paying market rates for workers this likely to die young made no commercial sense. By 1613 the enslaved outnumbered the forzados two to one. The Fugger concession was cancelled in 1645 and the mines passed to the royal government.

The 18th century is what you actually see when you walk around Almadén today. In August 1752, responding to repeated epidemics and heavy mortality among townspeople and forzados alike, the superintendent of the mines Francisco Javier de Villegas proposed founding the Real Hospital de Mineros; building ran from 1755 to 1773. The hexagonal bullring went up alongside it as a funding device: 24 dwellings around the outer ring, rented out to relieve overcrowding in the town and raise money for the hospital, with an arena inside seating around 4,000 that doubled as the civic centre.

Two more institutions date from the same decades. The Real Cárcel de Forzados, a purpose-built convict prison completed around 1754 to a design by the royal army engineer Silvestre Abarca, was wound up by royal decree in August 1800 and demolished on 5 May 1969; the mining engineering school of the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha stands on the site. The other is the Academia de Minas, created by Carlos III on 14 July 1777, the first school of mines in Spain and the fourth in the world after Freiberg, Schemnitz and St Petersburg. Andrés Manuel del Río, who discovered vanadium, passed through its classrooms.

Safer technology arrived in the last quarter of the 18th century and free workers came back; the penal establishment closed in 1801. In 1835 the mine was leased to N M Rothschild and Sons, whose family firm already owned Idrija, giving it a global lock on quicksilver until New Almaden was found in California. Spain took the mine back in 1863.

Forced labour returned in the 20th century. A Republican labour camp operated here and continued as a Francoist concentration camp after the Civil War, with penal detachments still working in the town through the 1940s. Record output came in 1941, 82,000 flasks of mercury, using prisoners of war.

The end was economic. The price per 34 kg flask fell from a peak of 571 US dollars in 1965 to 121 dollars in 1976, and the mine shut in 2000 as demand collapsed. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2012 under criteria ii and iv, arguing that Almadén and Idrija together are the most important surviving evidence of an entire socio-technical system built around one metal.

Visiting

Everything starts at the visitor reception centre at Cerco de San Teodoro, on the edge of town. Parking is free, with 25 car spaces and six coach spaces next to the main entrance.

The standard ticket, La Mina Esencial, costs 18 euros for adults aged 19 to 64 at the desk or 17 online. Ages 4 to 18 and over-65s pay 15 euros, or 14 online, and groups of twelve or more pay 16 euros a head, 15 online. Buy it at least 48 hours before your visit. The park runs Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:30 to 19:30 from May to September, and 10:00 to 14:00 and 15:30 to 18:30 from October to April, closed on Mondays that are not public holidays and on 1 and 6 January, Easter Sunday, and 24, 25 and 31 December.

Guided descents leave twice a day, at 10:30 in the morning and at 15:30 from October to April or 16:30 from May to September. Reckon on two hours at the park in total, roughly an hour and a half of it underground.

After a briefing at the San Teodoro and San Aquilino enclosure you are kitted out with a hairnet, a helmet and a mine lamp issued one per five people, then taken into the historic section of the mine. You come out at the first level, 50 metres down, the only level open to the public. The gallery is the 17th and 18th century workings, preserved as they were cut, and the guide covers the geology of the deposit, the techniques used at each period and the lives of the forzados. Part of the route is done on the mine train, along an old extraction gallery. Coming back up you either take a minibus to reception or walk, the walking option passing the Pacific furnaces.

The same ticket includes the Real Hospital de Mineros, which you visit on your own with no guide. Allow an hour and a half. Inside are exhibition rooms on the history of the hospital, on the society and culture of the mining district, and on the holdings of the Archivo Histórico de las Minas de Almadén y Arrayanes, plus the cell where sick forzados were kept. It opens 10:30 to 14:00 and 15:30 to 19:00 from October to April, or 16:30 to 20:00 from May to September, with no new admissions in the final half hour.

Photography is not allowed inside the mine or the exhibition spaces except in designated areas and with the guide’s express permission. Children under four cannot go down at all, though they get into the reception centre free. Eating and drinking are confined to the café and the picnic area, smoking is banned throughout the park, umbrellas are not allowed in, and lockers are available.

The outdoor installations and the hospital are adapted for reduced mobility and part of the underground route is too, but the mine interior is not fully adapted. Flag any specific need when you book.

Tips

• Book online rather than by phone or at the desk. The park applies a reduction of at least one euro per ticket for online purchases, and the booking is compulsory 48 hours ahead either way.

• Come at the weekend if you are travelling alone or as a couple. From Tuesday to Thursday the mine descent needs a group of at least twelve people to run, so an individual booking only works if a group has already formed. Friday to Sunday there is no minimum.

• Walk-up tickets exist but are a gamble. You can buy at the box office just before a departure only if there is still room to fill a group of twenty, and from Tuesday to Thursday only if twelve people are there.

• Take a light jacket underground even in August. The temperature down there is constant, but the humidity makes it feel cooler, and there is mud and standing water on the floor. Wear shoes and clothes you do not mind ruining.

• Take the 10:30 slot in summer. The afternoon departure does not run until 16:30 between May and September, leaving you in town through the hottest part of the day.

• Know the cancellation terms before you commit. Nothing can be cancelled within 48 hours of the visit. Cancel more than 15 days ahead and you get a refund minus 5 euros per person; inside 15 days the deduction is 10 euros. Date changes are possible subject to availability, by phone on 926 265 002 between 11:00 and 14:00 or 15:30 and 18:30, Tuesday to Friday.

• Drive if you can. From Ciudad Real the run takes about an hour and fifteen minutes on the A-41, the N-420 and then the CM-4112, CM-4110 and CM-415; from Córdoba it is about an hour and a half on the N-432 and CO-31 to the N-502 turn-off.

• Eat where you are allowed to. Food and drink are barred anywhere in the grounds except the café, the restaurant and a covered picnic area under a thatched roof, and no food can be taken into the mine. Card payment is advised at the box office, and the only animals admitted are guide dogs.

• The district tourist office is inside the bullring on C/ General Espartero, on 661 921 045. Ask there about the town’s other buildings rather than on the mining park’s reservations line.