Santa Marta is a new location for fluorescent minerals in Spain. It is also home to the Mugemisa geological and mining museum where you can visit its "Sala negra", the largest in Spain where fluorescent minerals are exhibited from all over the world.
Santa Marta is currently known as an eminently agricultural town, however a century ago it was better known for its mining.
Really the mining in Santa Marta begins at the end of the XIX century. In the years 1870 to 1890 the vanadium was exploited in Santa Marta, the importance of the exploitation of this resource had a lot of repercussion in the European mining area, in fact it became in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the greatest exploitation of this metal in the world, until it was discovered in the Altiplano del Colorado (USA) and in South America separate vanadate deposits that led, along with the depletion of vanadium in Santa Marta, the abandonment of the exploitation of this metal towards 1912.
The real instigator of the mining Santa Marta was the Facultative of Mines D. Fernando Baxeres, who was the discoverer of the deposits of Santa Marta, this sold the rights to the mining companies "New Vanadium Alloy", English company that initially exploited the mine Constant ( Los Llanos) and the French company "Minera y Metalurgia de Santa Marta" which in 1902 started the vanadiniferal exploitation in the Reserve Mine.
The English company revolutionized mining in Santa Marta, which until then was limited to mining of prey in small and shallow galleries. The "New Vanadium Alloy" set up a laundry room with a Ferraris ball mill and Wilfley tables and course, which reached a production of 800 kg of 10% Vanadium concentrates a day, washing around 20 to 25 Tm, something spectacular in those dates They are still preserved in the facilities of the mine, the laundry, the footings and bases of the infrastructures created.
The vanadium exploitations were limited to the first 20 to 40 meters of depth, from this depth the reefs were no longer altered and were mineralized with the main paragenesis that today is in Santa Marta, which is: Blenda (SZn) , Galena argentiferous (SPb, Ag), Pyrite (FeS2) and Chalcopyrite (FeCuS2), of these minerals in Santa Marta has been mainly exploited lead (Galena) and silver (which comes mainly from the galena and part of the blenda ).
The operations of Pb-Ag in Santa Marta began in 1.912, taking over the exploitation in the Constant Mine the company S. M. and M. de Peñarroya, to work the galena and the blenda. This company installed a 150 KW poor gas central to electrify the services and made modifications in the laundry to separate the new mineral substances, reaching the maximum production in the year 1,915 in which 3,000 tons were obtained. of blenda and galena.
Calcite, Aragonite under SW
Hydrozincite, Calcite under SW
Calcite, Aragonite, Hydrozincite and unknown under SW