Berbes mining area, Ribadesella, Asturias, Spaini

Regional Level Types
Berbes mining area	Mining Area
Ribadesella	Municipality
Asturias	Autonomous Community
Spain	Country

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From the 1930s, this area was operated by several underfinanced entrepreneurs and companies.

The first trials were made by two pioneers of fluorite mining in Asturias: Celestino Llaneza, advised by Frédéric Edward Otlet Dewolf, who first extracted the mineral in the area known as 'El Taraniello' and afterwards collected the detrital fluorite accumulated by erosion and the sea washing the surfacing veins in the Frondil area.

Simultaneously, the company owned by Federico Lipperheide Henke operated the central-southern part of the most important vein in this area: the 'Ana' vein.

After 1939, when the Spanish Civil War finished, Enrique Fernández Alberdi came on stage, claiming the following concessions between 1940 and 1942: Rosario, Ampliación a Rosario, Concha, and Leonor y Tere, and soon after he sold them to Aldecoa Co.

This company operated the northern area of the Ana vein and the parallel associated veins, NW-SE orientation, by underground mining. These mining works are made along the mineral concentrations without any ground support, which caused the collapse of the galleries and the bankruptcy of Aldecoa and Co. in 1949, the same year in which Minersa started deepening the main pit of the Ana mine on the N-634 road, km. 9.

Then the mining concessions passed into the hands of the creditors of Aldecoa, who set up a company with 50% of the capital belonging to the German consortium Fluor-Chemie. The new mine, called Vulcano, was operated for fluorspar through a gallery dug in the Frondil area until 1962.

The mining concessions on which this deposit was located and the treatment plant, using gravity with manual fluting, built for processing in the village of Barredo, were acquired by Minersa in that year.

From that date, this company became the main one in the Berbes mining area. The rest of the existing companies, like the company owned by Saturno Barro, or ‘Minera Togar’, that operated the ‘Coto minero Pilar’, sold their crude production to Minersa for concentration in the plant that the company had in the village of Torre. Finally, in 1979, they closed down definitively, and Minerales y Productos Derivados S.A. acquired all their assets.

By 1970 Minersa developed a range of explorations in the area led by geologists and mining engineers trained at the German university of Clausthal. The data obtained from these drillings led to the opening of the Cueto L’Aspa open pit and the beginning of mining in one emblematic area for Spanish and international mineralogy from then to nowadays: La Cabaña. The associations between blue-violet fluorite cubes and baryte crystals and the double-terminated quartz crystals with multiphase inclusions that appear in this enclave are coveted specimens for collectors.

From a mineralogical point of view, the paragenesis from the whole Ana Mine area (La Cabaña, El Frondil, El Cueto L'Aspa, and La Busteriza) is composed of fluorite, barite, quartz, and calcite, as well as highly localized carbonates such as azurite and malachite, oxides such as goethite, sulfides such as pyrite, and some others that are much more scarce, like cinnabar and tetrahedrite.

Fluorite in Triassic limestone (except for Cuetu L'Aspa, where fluorite occurs in silicified limestone of Carboniferous age).

Commodity List

This is a list of exploitable or exploited mineral commodities recorded from this region.

Mineral List

Mineral list contains entries from the region specified including sub-localities

11 valid minerals.

Rock Types Recorded

Rock list contains entries from the region specified including sub-localities