Year 2024/2025 T2

YEAR 2024/2025

4 de Febrero de 2025

Last January 30th 1º ESO students visited Río Tinto Mines.A trip that gave them the opportunity to know the oldest mines in the world, as well as the evolution of some mining techniques from prehistoric times to present day.

In the Mining Museum, located in the old hospital building of Río Tinto Company Ltd., they could go insde a Roman mine, know the geological secrets of the subsoil and they could understand why the mining activity is able to modify a territory and its inhabitants.

The walk through Peña de Hierro Mine taught them how the works in the deposit were since the beginning (it was already exploited by the Romans) and its evolution until its closure in 1970. This deposit started to be exploited as an open-pit mine in the middle of the 19th century with the so-called «cortas», which let them get a higher level of extraction and have shaped the present landscape of the zone, with the huge drillings carried out. We have to highlight that Peña Copper Mines Company Ltd., owner of the mine, would stand out in its time with better industrial welfare, that led its workers to syndicate. It was clearly different from the Río Tinto Company Ltd., that still had conflict relations with workers and also took reprisals when strikes and protests occurred.

When they travelled on the Mine Train, whose line was built between 1873 and 1875 by the British Río Tinto Company Ltd. (trying to move the minerals that were extracted from its deposits in the mining basin of Riotinto-Nerva and the sea) our students went through the former areas of minerals transformation, railway facilities and they could also see the incredible landscape around the railway line.

And last but not least, the visit to the English neighbourhood of Bellavista, an authentic enclosed colony where the executive group of Río Tinto Company Ltd. used to live, isolated from the local population, keeping a completely British lifestyle, with their traditional tea time, and its leasure and sport activities like bridge, tennis, polo... and football, a sport that was introduced in our country, unknown until then.