The Most Remarkable Mines in the World
12 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable mines in the world are Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) (Austria), Mir diamond mine (Russia) and Big Hole (South Africa). The list covers 12 mines in 10 countries. Germany has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A mine is a place where people took a mountain apart, and the remarkable ones show it. Some are vast open pits, stepped and terraced until the earth looks like an amphitheatre. Others leave engine houses on sea cliffs, red hills carved by water, or galleries where minerals have stained the rock in colours no painter would choose. Their beauty is never decorative: it comes from scale, from the traces of tools, and from the stubbornness of the work.
The range in our list is wide. Botallack's engine houses stand on the Cornish cliffs above the Atlantic, part of the Cornwall and West Devon mining landscape. The Erzberg in Styria is an iron mountain cut into giant steps. At Kimberley, the Big Hole was dug largely by hand during the diamond rush, while Bingham Canyon in Utah is one of the deepest open pits on earth. Las Médulas in Spain shows what Roman engineers left after washing whole hillsides away for gold, and the Zollverein complex in Essen turned a coal mine into a manifesto of modern industrial architecture.
The places here were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the collection also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) | Mine | Austria | |
| 2 | Mir diamond mine | Mine | Russia | |
| 3 | Big Hole | Mine | South Africa | |
| 4 | Bingham Canyon Mine | Mine | United States | |
| 5 | Las Médulas | Mine | Spain | ✓ |
| 6 | Lake Retba | Quarry | Senegal | |
| 7 | Botallack Mine | Mine | United Kingdom | |
| 8 | Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes | Mine | Germany | |
| 9 | Falun Mine | Mine | Sweden | |
| 10 | Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex | Mine | Germany | ✓ |
| 11 | Sado Mine | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 12 | Kennecott Mines | Mine | United States |
01 Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg)
Erzberg
Austria47.525° N 14.912° E
Image by MartinStr from Pixabay Above the old mining town of Eisenerz in Upper Styria, a whole mountain has been cut into a staircase. The Erzberg, the "ore mountain", rises in rust-red and ochre terraces that give it the silhouette of a stepped pyramid, and locals half-jokingly call it the Styrian loaf of bread. It is the largest open-pit iron ore mine in Central Europe and the most important ore body in the Alps, and it is still working: every year around twelve million tonnes of rock are blasted from its benches to yield roughly three million tonnes of ore, which feeds the steelworks of Linz and Leoben-Donawitz.
Did you know? According to legend, a captured water sprite offered the locals gold for ten years, silver for a hundred or iron forever; they chose iron, and he revealed the Erzberg.
02 Mir diamond mine
Russia · 2 km from Mirny62.526° N 113.984° E
Yanaudanenko · CC BY 4.0 On the edge of the town of Mirny in Yakutia, the ground drops away into a vast spiral funnel: the Mir pipe, one of the largest holes ever dug by people. The open pit is about 1,200 metres across and more than 525 metres deep, its walls terraced by the haul road that once wound down to the bottom, and from the viewing platform at its rim the trucks and machines that worked it would have looked like toys. The town of Mirny itself grew up beside the pit.
Did you know? In the final years of open-pit work, dump trucks climbed a spiral road about 8 kilometres long from the bottom of the pit to its rim.
03 Big Hole
South Africa · 1.4 km from Kimberley28.739° S 24.759° E
Irene2005 · CC BY 2.0 The Big Hole in Kimberley is what remains of one of the great rushes of the nineteenth century. In 1871 diamonds were found on a small hill, Colesberg Kopje, on the farm of the De Beer brothers, and within weeks the hill was carved into hundreds of claims. The camp of diggers, called New Rush, grew to around 50,000 people and was renamed Kimberley in 1873 after the British Colonial Secretary. Diggers worked by hand with picks and shovels, and the hill turned into a pit.
Did you know? Diamonds on Colesberg Kopje were found in 1871 by Esau Damoense, cook to Fleetwood Rawstorne's Red Cap Party, who had reportedly been sent there as a punishment.
04 Bingham Canyon Mine
United States · 33.7 km from Salt Lake City40.522° N 112.149° W
David Ratledge · CC BY 4.0 The Bingham Canyon Mine, known to locals as the Kennecott copper mine, is the largest human-made excavation on Earth and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. Cut into the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake City, the pit is more than 1.2 km deep and about 4 km across, a vast terraced amphitheatre of stepped benches. It is visible to the naked eye from orbit, and it is thought to have produced more copper than any other mine in history. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966.
Did you know? The metals taken from Bingham Canyon are worth more than the output of the Comstock Lode, the Klondike and the California gold rush combined.
05 Las Médulas
Spain42.459° N 6.759° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by magocarlosyo from Pixabay Las Médulas, in the Bierzo district of north-western Spain, looks like a natural wonder — jagged peaks and hollows of vivid orange-red earth rising from chestnut woods — but it is largely man-made. It is what remains of the largest open-cast gold mine in the Roman Empire, where engineers dismantled entire hillsides with water. UNESCO listed the cultural landscape in 1997, and the landscape it recognises includes not only the ravaged hills but the canals, reservoirs, settlements and spoil heaps that made the operation work.
Did you know? Pliny the Elder estimated that the mines of north-west Hispania yielded about 20,000 Roman pounds of gold, some 6.5 tonnes, every year.
06 Lake Retba
Charlie kirk is my idol
Senegal · 29.2 km from Dakar14.839° N 17.234° W
Issiaga0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Retba owes its colour to Dunaliella salina, a microalga that thrives in extremely salty water and produces a red pigment as protection against intense sun and salt stress — the more stress, the more pigment, which is why the lake's famous pink deepens on bright days and fades under cloud. It isn't a dye or a mineral stain; it's a living organism visibly reacting to weather in real time.
Did you know? For decades the lake was the finishing point of the Paris–Dakar Rally, until the race left Africa after 2008.
07 Botallack Mine
United Kingdom · 9.5 km from Penzance50.133° N 5.683° W
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Botallack is the image of Cornish mining that everyone knows even if they have never heard the name: two roofless stone engine houses, one perched on a ledge just above the surf, the other a little higher up the cliff, with the Atlantic breaking beneath them. These are the Crowns. The lower house was built in 1835 for a pumping engine made by Harvey and Company of Hayle; the upper one followed in 1862 to hold a winding engine that hauled wagons up the Boscawen Diagonal Shaft, sunk between 1858 and 1862, which ran at a slant out beneath the sea floor.
Did you know? On 18 April 1863 the chain hauling a loaded man-skip up the Boscawen Diagonal Shaft snapped, and nine miners were killed in the fall.
08 Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes
Feengrotten
Germany · 36.8 km from Jena50.635° N 11.343° E
Image by uschel from Pixabay The Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes are not a natural cave but an old mine that nature took back and painted. From 1544, with interruptions, miners at the Jeremias Glück mine on the edge of Saalfeld in Thuringia cut into alum-bearing shale; alum was prized for dyeing cloth, tanning, medicine and clarifying water. Alum mining ended in 1850, and for some decades afterwards ochre for pigments was still won here, but the deeper galleries lay forgotten. When they were rediscovered in 1910, the explorers found the tunnels transformed: water seeping through the mineral-rich rock had left dripstone in improbable colours.
Did you know? The dripstones here grow perhaps a thousand times faster than limestone formations, because they consist largely of soft diadochite, an iron phosphate-sulphate known as mountain butter.
09 Falun Mine
Falun och Kopparbergslagen
Sweden · 1.3 km from Falun60.605° N 15.631° E
Per Falun · CC BY-SA 4.0 For roughly a thousand years men dug copper out of the Great Copper Mountain at Falun, in the Swedish province of Dalarna. Archaeology suggests mining began around the year 1000, it was certainly under way by 1080, and the first written record dates from 1288. At its height, around 1650, the mine yielded more than 3,000 tonnes of copper a year, and Sweden supplied some two-thirds of the copper Europe needed; the wealth of Falun helped to pay for the country's age as a great power. A charter of 1347 organised the miners into a company in which shares followed ownership of the smelters, an arrangement often described as a forerunner of the modern joint-stock company. Commercial mining ended only on 8 December 1992.
Did you know? The element selenium was discovered in 1817 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn in pyrite from the mine used to make sulphuric acid.
10 Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex
Zeche Zollverein
Germany · 4.5 km from Essen51.486° N 7.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jnabl from Pixabay Zollverein is often called the most beautiful coal mine in the world, and the phrase is less of a joke than it sounds. Its Shaft 12, opened in 1932 and designed by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, treated a colliery as a piece of modern architecture: plain cubic buildings of steel trusses and reinforced concrete, with a double-trestle winding tower over the shaft. That tower became the emblem of German heavy industry and later of the Ruhr's reinvention, and it is the image most people bring home from Essen.
Did you know? The 7.2-tonne coal cube on display measures 1.6 m along each edge and is described as the largest single block of coal ever cut.
11 Sado Mine
Japan38.042° N 138.256° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0 For much of the 17th century, a mountain on Sado, an island in the Sea of Japan off Niigata, was one of the richest gold and silver sources in the world. The Sado mines were worked from medieval times, but their great era began in 1601, when a vein was found at Aikawa soon after Tokugawa Ieyasu took the island. Under direct control of the shogunate, the Aikawa mine produced an estimated 400 kilograms of gold a year at its early peak, together with large quantities of silver that went into the Tokugawa coinage and was exported to China.
Did you know? A Heian-era tale collection from around the late 11th century tells of a miner from Noto who crossed to Sado and returned with a cloth full of gold sand.
12 Kennecott Mines
Kennecott
United States61.486° N 142.889° W
Christoph Strässler from Oberdorf BL, Schweiz · CC BY-SA 2.0 Kennecott is a company town left almost intact where a copper boom ended: a cluster of wooden buildings stacked up a hillside above the Kennicott Glacier, deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska. Its landmark is the concentration mill, a fourteen-storey building, raised mainly between 1909 and 1923, into which aerial tramways delivered ore from the mines high above, and down through which the richest rock was sent by chute straight to the sacking floor.
Did you know? When Stephen Birch surveyed the Bonanza claim, it was then the richest known concentration of copper in the world.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most remarkable mine in the world?
- On our list, Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) (Austria) ranks first, followed by Mir diamond mine (Russia) and Big Hole (South Africa).
- Was the Big Hole in Kimberley dug by hand?
- Largely, yes. During the diamond rush that began in 1871, thousands of miners worked the Kimberley pipe with picks and shovels, creating one of the largest hand-dug excavations in the world.
- How did the Romans mine gold at Las Médulas?
- They used a method later described by Pliny the Elder as ruina montium: water channelled into galleries cut inside the hills brought the mountainside down, and the debris was washed for gold. The red pinnacles left behind are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Which country has the most remarkable mines?
- In our collection, the most come from Germany (2), the United States (2) and Austria (1).
- How many mines are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 12 mines in 10 countries. Germany has the most, with 2.