Discover the Mining Park

The Almadén Mining Park is a living inheritance of two thousand years of Almadén operation. After closing mining activity in 2003, the oldest mines in the world, in operation up until our time, show us their secrets.

Mercury, the living silver of the Romans, is shown at the park in all of its aspects: the extraction of its mineral, cinnabar, mercury sulphur, its transformation in the metallurgical furnaces, its physical and chemical properties, its uses, and of course, its eternal history.

The Mining Park's facilities, wells and buildings are the heart of Spanish sites on the World Heritage List, under the name Heritage of Mercury. Almadén and Idrija.

The visit to the Almadén Mining Park starts with the surface mining facilities at the Visitors' Centre and continues through the old workshops and the San Aquilino and San Teodoro shafts. Before touring the underground galleries, you visit the Mining Interpretation Centre, where indispensable prior knowledge will be given on the historical evolution of mining work.

The tour inside the mine begins by going down the San Teodoro shaft until reaching the 1st floor, 50 metres down, in a miner's cage. The walking tour goes through a real mine, operated in the 16th and 17th centuries, under real mining practise conditions: helmet use, apparent lack of modern lighting and support lighting with individual lamps.

You exit to the surface with a cart train equipped to transport the public continuing the visit through outside facilities: Aludeles furnaces (17th century), Gate of Charles IV, the cart gate with its carriageway, the tile kiln, and then to the Mercury Museum, where there are rooms with geology and palaeontology from the area, interactive physics and chemical experiments with mercury, and the history of this metal's metallurgy and transportation to America.

End the tour by returning in our electric passenger mini-buses to the Visitors' Centre, where you can purchase several souvenirs related to the visit, in addition to other restaurant, cafeteria, restroom, information services, etc.