What a sight! The long line of carefully built individual showers in the miners’ washroom appears to be never-ending. Here every man had his own cabin. The progressive features on the site are mainly due [...] are put in the appropriate mood by a documentary film showing aspects of the everyday life of the miners in the old times. The subsequent guided tour of the simulated galleries enables them to get a more [...] history. After that it is high time to take a walk along the colliers’ trail, which leads from the miners washrooms, via the lamp room and wages house to one of the huge pithead towers. And those who still

routes. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, coal was mined industrially in underground mines, but due to problems with water drainage, mining ceased in 1898. The museum opened in 1994 in the

area by high walls. The mining company not only dictated everyday working conditions but also the miners´ private lives in the neighbouring housing settlement. Since 1983 visitors have been allowed inside

don a miner’s helmet and lamp before descending into the underworld to find out what everyday conditions were like for the miners who once worked here. Their guides are themselves former miners. On the [...] more at any moment. The showers in the pithead baths seem to be only waiting for the coal-smeared miners to arrive. Even the steam-driven winding wheels which were in operation till 1970 are still working

technology of what was once Europe's largest coal mine. What was it like when the rhythm of gigantic machines and conveyor belts determined the lives of 5,000 miners and their families? The "Portal of Industrial

given its own locomotives and drivers. It was kept busy by products and goods for the nearby coal mines until it was forced to close in 1969. One year earlier the DGEG was set up as a private organisation

played by the women in the community. And then it is time to go underground: complete with helmet, miners lamp, and a local collier. After that a simulated ride through a tunnel on a modern pit railway

open staircase. From up there, the panoramic view reveals a landscape where former open-cast lignite mines have been transformed into attractive lakes. In the museum itself, visitors breathe the smell of pressed

the remarkably genuine sound of crackling fire and bursting rock. The Rammelsberg Museum and Visitor Mine near Goslar stages 1,000 years of mining history; from the age-old method of mining ore by laying [...] and zinc ores. All this is accompanied by vivid sound effects of everyday working conditions. The mine was inscribed as a World Cultural Heritage site in 1992 – along with the former Imperial Town of Goslar

materials and gave work and bread to the people in the brickworks, lime furnaces, alum plants and mines – not to speak of serious illnesses in the course of their working-lives. All this is recalled in

landscape is being created. North-east of Eschweiler is the Inden open-cast mine , one of three brown coal open-cast mines in the Rhineland coal area where 100,000,000 tons of brown coal are mined by [...] open-cast mine southeast of Mönchengladbach even a highway was laid and years later after the excavation of brown coal at almost the same place rebuilt again. As for the other open-cast mines, thousands [...] the "Sophienhöhe", waste material from one of the largest "holes" in Europe, the Hambach open-cast mine , and swathes of smoke rising into the sky from the cooling towers of the Weisweiler Coal Power and

The lead and silver mines of Lavrion, on the Greek mainland south of Athens, were important in classical antiquity and in more recent centuries, and were worked in the 19th century by a Greek and a French

Falun Mine. Once the world’s largest copper mine and today the heart of a unique historic industrial landscape, which was designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. A path meanders around the mine and [...] formerly used to drag the ore with a rope winch to the surface. More than one thousand years of the mine’s history are displayed in the local mining museum. Most spectacular is the coin cabinet with probably [...] visit is to descend into the 67 metre deep gallery and underground chambers, which took the Swedish miners centuries to dig out of the rock. The manor houses built in the area demonstrate that mining was

partly near-surface coal layers. Now, iron mills, foundries and coke plants joined the numerous mines. Since then the immense industrial plants have largely disappeared. Only the award-winning Black Country

case: here, in southwestern Belgium, is the 19th century heart of one of the country's largest coal mines. The founder of this neoclassical complex, which includes a workers' residential area with over 400

Queen Augusta mine), which was sunk to a depth of 260 m in 1869. From 1946 the mine was named after the philosopher Karl Liebknecht. The museum was established from 1976 by former miners and was officially

colliery museum erected on the site is devoted to the accident. Surrounding this section are the miners’ changing rooms, washrooms and pithead equipment that give visitors a good idea of the region whose

of San Andrés. Visitors of the Mining Park are able to reach it by taking a miner's cage down into the former cinnabar mine of the village. Tunnels and drifts that are centuries old lead them to a huge [...] mercury by offering interactive experiments. Even the Miners’ Hospital of 1752 partly is a museum today while the other part hosts the archives of the mines.

at a mine that began production in 1937. Shale from shallower deposits was extracted by open-cast working. Visitors are able to go 1 km underground on a train, to explore the working face of the mine, and [...] century miner. On the surface there are buildings where oil-bearing shale was separated from other stones, and towers where it was burned. The museum has a collection of oil paintings of the mines, and a

lamp room which in this case has the dimensions of an extended hall. In the large room where the miners once changed their clothes and received their pit lamps there is now a comprehensive museum dealing [...] interviews, bring the activities at the colliery back to life. From the lamp room visitors follow the miners below the surface and, with the help of historic equipment, learn how mining developed between 1937