Sardinia's Mine
Iglesias Area

In all the area you can breath the air of mining . Here there area the most famous and big mines of the area Monteponi and S. Giovanni which produced the finest samples of phosgenite all over the world.

Monteponi Mine: The first documented workings in Monteponi start for 1639 and closed definitevely few years ago. All the deeper galleries  where the best samples were found and sold from the miners, are now filled with water without any possibilities to recover something

Monteponi  Mine  today

The best minerals found in Monteponi were phosgenite , anglesite and cerussite

Monte Agruxiao Mine plants, just besided Monteponi

Monte Onixeddu Mine : this mine in the nearby of gonnesa was famous for the nice barites and calcites . the mine closed in the eighties.

	Monte Onixeddu  Mine On the left you can see how the entrances are closed today

S. Giovanni mine : was famous among the mineral collectors expecially for the nice samples of blue aragonite , calcite and barite. Inside the mine there is the cave of Santa Barbara ( closed to the public ) with walls covered with barite XX.   

Now the mine is closed and a process to do a Geo- Mining park of the area is started.

S. Giovanni Mine	Monteponi mine , seen from S. Giovanni Plants

This year for the first time it's was possilble for the people to visit the S. Giovanni mine  and the famous S.Barbara cave.

This cave was discovered in 1952 during the mine works and fortunatelly was preserved till our days . The cave is famous for being one of the most old as it was fomaed in Paleozoic rocks. and the walls of the cave are completely covered by Brown green barite XX that later was partly covered by classic aragonite stalactites and stalagmites.

Visiting the Cave is simply wonderful for a mineral collector it's like to  be in an enourmus geode. I recommend it if you are in this area of Sardinia. I hope the photos will gave you an idea.

The Map to see were the cave id located inside the mine

look at the wall of   barite and aragonite !!!