The Industrial Landscape of Rio Tinto, Huelva, Spain

Rio Tinto has the largest deposits of pyrite and copper pyrite and associated minerals in Europe. It was exploited by the pre-Roman Iberians for silver and copper, and later by the Romans. The greatest change to the landscape came with open-pit mining or quarrying by the British Rio Tinto Company in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century for pyrite for sulphur and copper. Even this will be obliterated by current mining projects — the Cerro Colorado project of 1973 was started by the Spanish successor company, Rio Tinto Minera (though still associated with the RTZ multi-national company), and more recently there has been an intensification of gold and silver extraction from the gossan which overlies the pyritic deposits. Damage to the industrial archaeology is also resulting from a large scale reclamation programme, and an attempt to develop a Museum Park on the site largely failed. This report briefly considers the remains at Rio Tinto, and includes photographs recording pre-1950 features of the mines

Archaeology · Art · Geography · Humanities · Urbanism, Landscape, and Tourism Studies