Erzberg (Styrian Erzberg)

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.

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. In 1928 the bench height was doubled to 24 metres, which fixed the bold, regular profile seen today. Underground mining ended in 1986.

The Erzberg is striking at any distance, but it rewards a closer look. The terraces are colour-banded by the changing rock, greys shading into the ferrous browns and oranges of the ore, and the great haul trucks moving along them look like toys against the scale of the cuts. In summer the mine opens to visitors as Abenteuer Erzberg: a converted giant mining truck known as the Hauly, with over 1,200 horsepower, carries passengers up the benches among the working machinery, and a former miners' train, the Katl, runs into a show mine where underground stations recreate the work of earlier generations. On Thursdays in season, tours include watching a blast. Each summer the terraces also host the Erzbergrodeo, a notoriously gruelling hard-enduro motorcycle race.

The mountain is the key landmark of the Styrian Iron Road, the historic route of the region's iron industry, and a reminder of how much of Austria's industrial history was built on a single deposit. Seen from Eisenerz below, the terraced peak closes the view like a monument to that history.

Getting there

The mine is on the edge of Eisenerz in Styria, at Vordernberger Straße 55; the visitor season runs from May to October. The nearest airport is Graz (GRZ), about 72 km away in a straight line; Graz is roughly an hour and a half by car. Amstetten in Lower Austria, about 67 km away, is the nearest larger town, but most visitors come from the Graz side.