The Roman Gold Mine that Ate Mountains

Summary by Krater

This video examines how Roman miners used hushing, a technique involving elaborate networks of tunnels and aqueducts, to extract gold from Las Médulas in northwest Spain. The operation reshaped the landscape into an extraordinary open-cast mine and left behind mountains of sediment.

From the video

Answers: How did Roman gold mining work at Las Médulas?

• Roman gold mining
• Las Médulas landscape
• Ruina montium hushing technique
• Roman aqueducts and water channels

What it concludes

• Roman miners used hushing, a technique of routing water through tunnels and reservoirs to strip away mountains of sediment and expose gold.
• The intensive mining operation at Las Médulas shifted more than 100 million cubic meters of sediment and transformed the local geography into a moonscape.
• The sheer difficulty of recovering gold from the site by the beginning of the 3rd century brought Roman mining there to an end.