Líthica – s'Hostal Quarries

Interesting facts

The Mineral Labyrinth is built from more than 3,000 blocks of marès laid dry without mortar, and was designed by Laetitia Lara with Nuria Román and Basile Ribas.

The labyrinth takes its inspiration from the Cretan myth of the Minotaur and was conceived to mark the association's twentieth anniversary.

To build it, supporters were invited to sponsor individual stones, the larger marès blocks known locally as rodones.

The name Líthica comes from the Greek word lithos, meaning stone.

The association began with about twenty members, and much of the clearing of rubble, path-building and planting was done by volunteers.

Marès is prized because it is soft enough to cut easily, but it is very sensitive to damp, which shaped how it was used in Menorcan buildings.

In 2017 the quarries were declared a Property of Ethnological Interest under Balearic heritage law.

Ruin lizards, Mediterranean tortoises, green toads and the Balearic warbler live among the stones and gardens of the old pits.

Since 2019 a summer festival called Fosquet, the Menorcan word for dusk, has filled the quarries with music and theatre.

Why it is worth it

On the edge of Ciutadella, the old stone quarries of s'Hostal have turned an industrial wound into one of the most unexpected gardens in the Mediterranean. For roughly two hundred years, from the end of the eighteenth century until 1994, quarrymen cut blocks of marès here, the soft calcarenite that gave Menorca its traditional buildings. What they left behind is a sunken landscape of about five hectares: pits, walls, stairs and chambers carved directly into the rock, the negative image of a whole island's architecture.

The site holds two very different kinds of quarry side by side, and the contrast is the heart of a visit. In the older sector the stone was cut by hand, following the natural veins of the rock, and the result is organic and irregular: hollows and passages of warm, tool-marked stone, now softened by plants rooted in the cracks and floors, so that the whole thing reads as a labyrinth of rock and vegetation. In the newer sector, worked with mechanical circular saws from the 1960s onwards, the stone was sliced away in clean slabs, leaving vast cubic rooms with sheer, perfectly flat walls striped by the blade. Walking from one to the other is like moving from a grotto into an abstract sculpture.

When extraction stopped, the quarries could easily have become a dump. Instead the sculptor and architect Laetitia Sauleau Lara founded the Líthica association in 1994 and began a long rehabilitation, with support from the town, to treat the pits as heritage of artistic and landscape value. Paths, stairs and ramps were cut in, and gardens planted: a medieval-style garden around a fountain with medicinal herbs, a botanical circuit of native Menorcan plants, a small freshwater pond, a stone maze and herb labyrinth laid out in 2014 and a labyrinth of orchards completed in 2018. The deep machine-cut quarries now serve as open-air halls for concerts, cinema and dance. In 2019 the project received a European Heritage Award (Europa Nostra) for conservation and adaptive reuse, with the jury praising how industry can create spaces and shapes found in no other kind of architecture.

Getting there

The quarries lie on the Camí Vell, about a kilometre outside Ciutadella, at the western end of Menorca. Menorca Airport (MAH) is about 34 km away.

Líthica – s'Hostal Quarries

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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