The Most Remarkable Mines in Europe
6 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable mines in Europe are Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) (Austria), Las Médulas (Spain) and Botallack Mine (United Kingdom). The list covers 6 mines in 5 countries. Germany has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Mining shaped Europe's economy for more than two thousand years, and some of its mines have left landscapes as striking as any natural wonder. Roman engineers moved mountains to reach gold, medieval Europe ran on iron and copper from a handful of great mines, and the industrial age raised pithead buildings of real architectural ambition. Where mining has ended, the scars, shafts and caverns remain as monuments to the work and risk behind the continent's wealth.
Las Médulas in northwestern Spain was the greatest gold mine of the Roman Empire, where water channelled from the mountains was used to collapse whole hillsides, leaving jagged red peaks among chestnut woods. The Erzberg in Styria is a mountain of iron ore worked since the Middle Ages and cut into giant open-pit terraces that give it the shape of a stepped pyramid. In Sweden, the Falun copper mine supplied much of Europe's copper in the seventeenth century; its Great Pit opened when the workings collapsed in 1687.
On the cliffs of west Cornwall, the engine houses of the Botallack Mine stand on the rocks above the Atlantic, with tin and copper workings that once ran out under the seabed. The Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes in Thuringia, a former alum slate mine, have filled with dripstone in shades of brown, ochre, green and blue. And in Essen, the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, with its steel-framed Shaft XII in the spirit of the Bauhaus, was once called the most beautiful coal mine in the world.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) | Mine | Austria | |
| 2 | Las Médulas | Mine | Spain | ✓ |
| 3 | Botallack Mine | Mine | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes | Mine | Germany | |
| 5 | Falun Mine | Mine | Sweden | |
| 6 | Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex | Mine | Germany | ✓ |
01 Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg)
Erzberg
Austria47.525° N 14.912° E
Image by MartinStr from Pixabay The mountain owes its colour and its value to siderite, an iron carbonate, mixed here with ankerite and dolomite in what is considered the largest siderite deposit in the world. Tradition dates mining on the Erzberg to around AD 712, a claim resting on an unconfirmed document; the first secure written mention comes from 1171. For centuries the ore was worked from galleries, with the mountain divided at a line called the Ebenhöhe between the smelting communities of Vordernberg on one side and Innerberg, today's Eisenerz, on the other. Gunpowder arrived in the eighteenth century and dynamite in 1870, and from the 1890s the miners began stripping the mountain in open terraces.
Did you know? The legend of the water sprite who revealed the ore was pictured on an Austrian postage stamp in 2022.
02 Las Médulas
Spain42.459° N 6.759° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by magocarlosyo from Pixabay The technique was called ruina montium, "the wrecking of mountains", and it was described by Pliny the Elder, who served as a procurator in the region in the 70s AD and may have seen it at work. Miners drove long galleries into the hill, then flooded them from reservoirs above until the pressure brought the whole slope down; the collapsed debris was washed through channels to separate the gold. To feed this, at least seven aqueducts tapped streams in the mountains of La Cabrera, some carried along precipitous rock faces. Pliny reckoned the region yielded 20,000 Roman pounds of gold a year, and large-scale extraction ran from the later first century AD for some two centuries.
Did you know? Over roughly 250 years of exploitation the region may have produced around five million Roman pounds of gold in total.
03 Botallack Mine
United Kingdom · 9.5 km from Penzance50.133° N 5.683° W
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Mining on this stretch of coast is recorded from the sixteenth century and is probably far older. Botallack worked tin, copper and arsenic, and in its heyday its galleries reached nearly half a mile out under the ocean. The mine became famous enough that in 1865 the Prince and Princess of Wales went down the Boscawen shaft, and for a while the owners charged ordinary visitors a guinea a head to follow them. Falling metal prices closed the mine in 1895. By then it had brought up, by modern estimates, some 14,500 tonnes of tin, 20,000 of copper and 1,500 of arsenic.
Did you know? Wilkie Collins went underground at Botallack in 1850 and wrote of hearing the surf roll over the workings far out under the sea.
04 Saalfeld Fairy Grottoes
Feengrotten
Germany · 36.8 km from Jena50.635° N 11.343° E
Image by uschel from Pixabay That colour is the whole spectacle. More than forty minerals have been identified here, and iron and other elements tint the formations in a range of browns, ochres and earthy tones set off against paler deposits. Because the drip is young in geological terms, measured in centuries rather than millennia, the formations are delicate and dense, crowding walls and ceilings like wax. Since 1993 the grottoes have been listed by Guinness World Records as the most colourful show grottoes in the world, and the claim is easy to believe once the lights come up.
Did you know? The grottoes are the type locality of diadochite: the mineral was first studied and described from here by the mineralogist August Breithaupt in 1837.
05 Falun Mine
Falun och Kopparbergslagen
Sweden · 1.3 km from Falun60.605° N 15.631° E
Per Falun · CC BY-SA 4.0 The centrepiece of the site is the Great Pit, Stora Stöten. Centuries of tunnelling left the mountain riddled with chambers, and on Midsummer's Eve 1687 the whole honeycomb gave way. Because it was a holiday no one was underground. What remained is a vast crater about 95 metres deep and some 1.6 kilometres around, its walls streaked in ochre, rust and grey where the ore-bearing rock is exposed. Standing on the rim and looking down into it, it is easy to understand Carl Linnaeus, who visited in the eighteenth century and called the mine one of the great wonders of Sweden but as horrible as hell itself, full of soot, heat, dust and corrosive vapour.
Did you know? Tantalum was first identified in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg, partly in mineral samples that came from Falun.
06 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 The mine itself goes back to 1847, when the Duisburg industrialist Franz Haniel, needing coke for steel, sank the first shaft and named the company after the German customs union. By 1890 it was the most productive mine in Germany. Shaft 12 was built as a central facility that could handle the output of the older shafts together, up to 12,000 tonnes a day. In 1961 a vast coking plant with 192 ovens, also designed by Schupp, opened alongside; at its peak it was among the most productive in the world. Mining ended on 23 December 1986 and the coke ovens went cold on 30 June 1993.
Did you know? In 1953 Zollverein raised 2.4 million tonnes of coal, more than any other mine in Germany that year.
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 are the most remarkable mines in Europe?
- On our list, Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg) (Austria) ranks first, followed by Las Médulas (Spain) and Botallack Mine (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most mines in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Germany (2), Austria (1) and Spain (1).
- How did the Romans mine gold at Las Médulas?
- They used a technique Pliny the Elder called ruina montium: water was brought from the mountains through canals and released into tunnels dug in the hillside, so that the pressure collapsed the rock and washed out the gold-bearing sediment.
- Where does Falu red paint come from?
- The traditional red paint of Swedish wooden houses is made from pigment produced from the copper mine waste at Falun. Its colour comes mainly from iron oxide.
- Why is Zollverein a World Heritage Site?
- The complex in Essen, especially Shaft XII designed by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, is an outstanding example of modernist industrial architecture and a record of the heavy industry of the Ruhr.
- How many mines are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 6 mines in 5 countries. Germany has the most, with 2.