Just next to the sea, in an unsuspecting resort town there's the remains of one of the most important iron mining operations in Catalonia. The 'Mines de Can Palomeres' were exploited irregularly since the late 1860's, but at the turn of the century an English company took hold of the place to 'show them how it was done'. They modernised the mines, installing a one-of-a-kind system to transport the ore from the hills straight into the container ships, taking advantage of the short distance between the mines and the sea.
The mines worked at full capacity from 1910 to 1915, when in the middle of WW1 one of the transporter ships was sunk by a German U-boat, making the company go bankrupt.
After they got abandoned, the underground workings served another purpose during the Spanish Civil War, being used as shelters and ammo depots. Then in the 60's-70's some of the adits were used for mushroom farming, while at the same time cavers started to be interested in the system, exploring and mapping it... and that's where things start to get interesting.
(Before I continue, let me say that sadly all of the pics are captures from my mate's video camera, I was supposed to do the pictures but had a massive camera failure... I still wanted to do a report so badly on this place so I tried my best to capture some shots from the video...)
Nowadays the hill where the mines are is a popular spot for hikers, and the council is trying to preserve/promote the heritage in some sort of way. Mos of the adits don't have much interest, they consist of a reinforced entrance and a short straight tunnel.
We kept walking up the hill and off the beaten path, looking for La Mina Gran (The Big Mine)... here's a map of our adventure for the day:
It's quite a place, to be honest... The exploreable part of the mine runs for more than 4 kms of galleries divided in a total of 8 levels. Seismic activity and gravity have affected the mine severly, at some points making it look more like a natural cave... I was amazed when I learned that they dug all of what you're about to see in only 5 years.
In the recent years these galleries have been used both for caving courses as the place has it all: it's gonna make you crawl, climb, jump, squeeze... Then vandals also discovered it (it's the most graffitied mine I've ever seen) and access has been free-for-all for many years. It used to be quite a popular spot until the council gated it off permanently with some iron bars, making it not even accessible to cavers because it seems there's a super important bat colony living there... Knowing this, we still wanted to check out if we could find a way in. At first it didn't seem like it, but thanks to both me and my mate being super skinny, we found a gap we could squeeze through...and we were in.
We were now in a big room that had formed as a result of various collapses. A caving club installed a guideline and some fixed ropes where needed to assist in navigating the system, so once we found said guideline, we just followed it into the depths...
After this initial squeeze/scramble down, we were now properly inside the mine. We knew we had a lot of ground to cover so instead of fully checking every level, we pressed on with the planned route. It was weird because we had just gone down and now we were facing a metal staircase and a slope that were leading us up again.
That's the view looking down that first slope. We later discovered that all the levels in the mine were linked by either similar slopes or stairs carved into the rock. We spent some time exploring that level, which in turn had more slopes and deviations leading to sublevels, looping around...quite fun, and also some beautiful patterns from the iron in the walls.
After exploring every nook and cranny of that level, it was time for more squeezing through (very!) narrow spaces to reach a place called 'The Broken Room', a huuuge slab of rock that had detached from the ceiling leaving a gap.
The Broken Room connects to The Big Room... We didn't have enough power in our torches to light up how big this room really was, but that tiny spot of light in the distance is me so you can get the idea of the size.
This space also has some crazy aerial passages that my mate attempted (there was like a 20m drop here) he then disappered into the darkness and came back from another gallery behind me!
Oh, and a furry mine friend we made, he was the tiniest mouse I've ever seen.
We were now in the middle of our journey, as we reached a place called The Slope. Of the many slopes, this is The Slope because it's the longest and most inclined one, giving you access to the lowest 4 levels of the mine (and we're already quite deep at this point...)
After that, you could that's where the 'good stuff' starts, but barely so... yes, you come to a more tidy set of galleries with rails on the floor, but the graffiti everywhere ruins it a bit.
Following the rails we arrived at what's considered the main attraction of the mine, a single surviving ore cart, vandalised to death, poor guy... Inside the cart there's a box with a notebook and a pen so people can leave their messages and little weird things.
At this point we were exhausted, it's a phisycally demanding place to navigate, we had been underground for about 5 hours at this point, and still needed to return to the surface... but we also had 3 more levels below us to explore, so we decided to gather our last bits of energy and go for a look even more into the depths. These last 4 levels were all connected by a nicely preserved staircase cut into the rock.
The levels all looked similar here, pillar and stall affairs with connecting shafts, which at times made for interesting phenomenons like the earth plug.
It was time to start heading back up to the surface, so of all the different routes, we took the stairs whenever possible.
Buuut we still had one thing to check...On the way to the surface we came across The Long Gallery, which is the longest adit in the whole site (1'7 kms). We were about to bail on it, but since we were already there...
We started walking along the adit when all of a sudden a really strong smell of sulphur hit us. It's true that we'd noticed that smell before in some other parts, but here it felt really dense and it served as our signal to call it a day and finally head back to the real world.
The mines worked at full capacity from 1910 to 1915, when in the middle of WW1 one of the transporter ships was sunk by a German U-boat, making the company go bankrupt.
After they got abandoned, the underground workings served another purpose during the Spanish Civil War, being used as shelters and ammo depots. Then in the 60's-70's some of the adits were used for mushroom farming, while at the same time cavers started to be interested in the system, exploring and mapping it... and that's where things start to get interesting.
(Before I continue, let me say that sadly all of the pics are captures from my mate's video camera, I was supposed to do the pictures but had a massive camera failure... I still wanted to do a report so badly on this place so I tried my best to capture some shots from the video...)
Nowadays the hill where the mines are is a popular spot for hikers, and the council is trying to preserve/promote the heritage in some sort of way. Mos of the adits don't have much interest, they consist of a reinforced entrance and a short straight tunnel.
We kept walking up the hill and off the beaten path, looking for La Mina Gran (The Big Mine)... here's a map of our adventure for the day:
It's quite a place, to be honest... The exploreable part of the mine runs for more than 4 kms of galleries divided in a total of 8 levels. Seismic activity and gravity have affected the mine severly, at some points making it look more like a natural cave... I was amazed when I learned that they dug all of what you're about to see in only 5 years.
In the recent years these galleries have been used both for caving courses as the place has it all: it's gonna make you crawl, climb, jump, squeeze... Then vandals also discovered it (it's the most graffitied mine I've ever seen) and access has been free-for-all for many years. It used to be quite a popular spot until the council gated it off permanently with some iron bars, making it not even accessible to cavers because it seems there's a super important bat colony living there... Knowing this, we still wanted to check out if we could find a way in. At first it didn't seem like it, but thanks to both me and my mate being super skinny, we found a gap we could squeeze through...and we were in.
We were now in a big room that had formed as a result of various collapses. A caving club installed a guideline and some fixed ropes where needed to assist in navigating the system, so once we found said guideline, we just followed it into the depths...
After this initial squeeze/scramble down, we were now properly inside the mine. We knew we had a lot of ground to cover so instead of fully checking every level, we pressed on with the planned route. It was weird because we had just gone down and now we were facing a metal staircase and a slope that were leading us up again.
That's the view looking down that first slope. We later discovered that all the levels in the mine were linked by either similar slopes or stairs carved into the rock. We spent some time exploring that level, which in turn had more slopes and deviations leading to sublevels, looping around...quite fun, and also some beautiful patterns from the iron in the walls.
After exploring every nook and cranny of that level, it was time for more squeezing through (very!) narrow spaces to reach a place called 'The Broken Room', a huuuge slab of rock that had detached from the ceiling leaving a gap.
The Broken Room connects to The Big Room... We didn't have enough power in our torches to light up how big this room really was, but that tiny spot of light in the distance is me so you can get the idea of the size.
This space also has some crazy aerial passages that my mate attempted (there was like a 20m drop here) he then disappered into the darkness and came back from another gallery behind me!
Oh, and a furry mine friend we made, he was the tiniest mouse I've ever seen.
We were now in the middle of our journey, as we reached a place called The Slope. Of the many slopes, this is The Slope because it's the longest and most inclined one, giving you access to the lowest 4 levels of the mine (and we're already quite deep at this point...)
After that, you could that's where the 'good stuff' starts, but barely so... yes, you come to a more tidy set of galleries with rails on the floor, but the graffiti everywhere ruins it a bit.
Following the rails we arrived at what's considered the main attraction of the mine, a single surviving ore cart, vandalised to death, poor guy... Inside the cart there's a box with a notebook and a pen so people can leave their messages and little weird things.
At this point we were exhausted, it's a phisycally demanding place to navigate, we had been underground for about 5 hours at this point, and still needed to return to the surface... but we also had 3 more levels below us to explore, so we decided to gather our last bits of energy and go for a look even more into the depths. These last 4 levels were all connected by a nicely preserved staircase cut into the rock.
The levels all looked similar here, pillar and stall affairs with connecting shafts, which at times made for interesting phenomenons like the earth plug.
It was time to start heading back up to the surface, so of all the different routes, we took the stairs whenever possible.
Buuut we still had one thing to check...On the way to the surface we came across The Long Gallery, which is the longest adit in the whole site (1'7 kms). We were about to bail on it, but since we were already there...
We started walking along the adit when all of a sudden a really strong smell of sulphur hit us. It's true that we'd noticed that smell before in some other parts, but here it felt really dense and it served as our signal to call it a day and finally head back to the real world.
