El COBRE - Extracción en una MINA ABANDONADA y visita a las embocaduras de este antiguo yacimiento

Stones with greenish-blue veins that emerge between the sandstone and clay and two caves excavated in the rock are what remains of the old copper mines in the town of Labata. Francisco Bescós, from the neighboring town of Panzano, will accompany us through this deposit that, in 1956, the company EMARSA (Explotaciones Mineras Aragonesas) tried to recover with twenty workers. This is a vein, and here we have, just under the nail, one of the grains that in its virgin state would have been red and as it has been exposed to the air and the sun, it has oxidized and is greenish in color. Here they have been chopping and plucking. Look here how the green color of the copper can be seen but completely spread out, without following a vein. Here we have vein, which is mounted on very soft salagón. And the sandstone that drags... You see, here there are grains, look at them, they are grains that should have been reddish, because they are grains of copper that have been grouped together, here we have one, when the light and the air hit it, they have lost their reddish color and they have rusted. Look, here's a nice piece. Look at the vein that comes out, look at the most beautiful vein that comes out in emerald color. Look. Look, the whole grain. People say that since they produced such low production, between 10 and 15%, they abandoned them because they were not profitable. An exploitation that gives you a 10 or a 15, that is ridiculous. Oh, how cool. That's oxidized copper. Through this area that we are now there were some rails where the minecart brought up the materials and we are going to go to the mouth where the slope of what is properly the mine already began. This is where we are going now where the rails for the wagon entered. Everything I am in now is flooded with water. Even the mouth itself. In this mine there were excavations, from older times, about 40 meters. When EMARSA started the excavation again, the first thing it had to do was empty it and clear it, because in winter, as it has such a steep slope, all the waters from the surrounding mountain come out and it fills up to the brim, it fills up to the mouth, of water. So, once they had cleaned those 40 meters that had already been excavated, they made a large circular platform to put the compressor, carts, hoses, materials, etc. And from there they began to do the second prospecting of the mine. Well, this is the mouth of the mine where the rails came down with the minecart. It seems that there is a tremendous inclination. And with that wagon that we have already mentioned, which also carried 400 kilos, they took the material outside. We are inside the mine, what the mine is, here we have the water, which since this year has been a very dry summer, it is lowered by 10, 12 or 20 meters. It is very clear, very fresh. And from that large circular square they dug again until they reached a depth of 90 meters. The material that came out was quite poor, it did not have a richness of more than 10, 12, even 15%. As they went deeper, the work became more and more expensive, because they had to invest more time and in the end they decided to abandon it because they brought molten copper imported from Peru and the already molten copper was cheaper than the one they had to prepare when it left this mine. These grains that we see are white, floury type, that is called mirror. They collected that apart from the mineral and it is like a slightly caked flour that they put in small bags, 8 or 10 kilos, made of cloth, not in a burlap bag, in a cloth bag, and in small quantities so that it would not become caked. . And they used that as insulating material. The material that goes inside the bulb sockets to separate the negative and positive poles is mirror, it was mirror. That which looks like plaster is a mirror. This water that we see here must remain approximately another 20 meters of water until reaching the large widening that they made to leave the material, hoses, van, compressor, etc. and from there are the 50 meters they did on the second attempt. The water is, as you see there on the wall, perfectly clear, you can drink it because it is perfectly clear. The work that Gonzalo, the manager, imposed on them was that each person had to make eight drills each one and a half meters deep, they had to be loaded with dynamite, they put four and a half cartridges of dynamite in each drill with a Remington detonator and they blew it up. And once they blew it up their job was done. They finished around 2 or 2:30 in the afternoon. From there the debris removal brigades had to enter. They chopped the large stones with a mallet to make them smaller, so they could be loaded into the cart, and the cart took the material outside. Outside there was another brigade that was still leaving and classifying. And when there was enough, a truck would come, load it and take it to the laundries. They took it down to Tarragona, to the town of Alforja. These are small concrete and stone stairs that the workers used to get out. And here is the widening where they emptied the cart and classified the material. This is a concrete platform that they made here in the mountains to anchor the motor that carried the lathe. These four screws anchored the lathe. It was a 4-cylinder Champion engine . Which was the one in charge of opening and untwisting the wire rope to move the cart up and down. There they had a small hut that they built in the shelter of the mountain to store the dynamite so that it wouldn't get wet. The fuses and detonators were taken to Labata by the manager every day. They didn't leave that in the mountains. This is the waste dump of the mine where it was thrown… All these stones are remains that were leaving the mine without mineral. And since they did not have mineral, they took advantage of the unevenness to throw it away. And this, as we have said, is all the waste material that does not have minerals. These stones that we see here scattered among the oaks are the tailings of the second mine, the secondary mouth. Let's get closer to her now. This is the entrance itself . These huge gaps must be taken into account that there were no excavators like there are now, that everything had to be done with picks and the earth had to be removed with wheelbarrows and then the work took forever. Here they extracted the same mineral, in smaller quantities. You realize to remove those stones that you first had to mesh them with a mallet and then lift them up by hand. There was no cable or trolley here. This was all manual. These holes that we have here in the wall, which is the end of the drills where the dynamite exploded, were made with drills 1.50 meters long and four and a half cartridges of dynamite were placed with the corresponding detonator. Then, these rocks that we have here, which is what the dynamite breaks. They are boulders weighing 200 kilos, any of them, because they had to cut them into pieces with clubs, clubs that on one side had a flat mouth and on the other side were sharp to facilitate the cutting of the stones, and then they had to climb them in turns towards the outside, because here there was no cable, nor was there a trolley, nor was there a winch, everything had to be removed by hand. On Sundays until noon they did cleaning and maintenance. At 12 solar time we had to finish all kinds of work because at one o'clock there was mass, the same in Labata as in Panzano and the priests reported, they notified the civil guard and the people who did not go to mass and were working for the mountain, the civil guard denounced her. The slope is enormous and all the material they removed had to be carried by hand to the outside, to the flat land where I am now, so the work was enormous. They worked for a year and a half, if they started at the beginning of '56, because it was quite cold when they started, it was the end of winter, so they would abandon in the middle of '58. Nowadays, there is hardly any memory of an activity left in the Labata copper mines. which occupied around twenty people from the area for less than two years. I am Eugenio Monesma, director and producer of the documentary you just watched. 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