Logbook · 3 places

What to see and do in Cármenes

What to see and do in Cármenes (La Montaña de Riaño, León): 3 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Historical milestones

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Spain › Castile and León › León › La Montaña de Riaño › Cármenes

What to see and do in Cármenes

Cármenes
Village
Cármenes is a municipality of around 355 inhabitants situated at 1,158 metres above sea level in the Torío valley, in the province of León, and groups together seventeen villages. Its archaeological fame comes from the La Profunda mine, a cave where copper was already being extracted in the Chalcolithic and Final Bronze Age by means of vaults dug with stone tools; it was worked again in 1895 after almost two thousand years at a standstill. After the Astur-Cantabrian wars, the area was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and remains of pottery, amphorae and Roman coins were found near the mine. The Viancii, a pre-Roman people, went on living in the region until the 4th century, as attested by a funerary stele found in one of its meadows.
Mine of La Profunda
Monument
A copper working whose oldest activity has been dated between 2700 and 2490 BC, one of the best documented prehistoric mining sites in the north of the peninsula, in the municipal district of Cármenes.
The return of copper to La Profunda
Historical milestone
In 1895 a mining company resumed copper extraction at La Profunda after almost two thousand years of silence, reopening galleries that had already been worked in prehistory and in Roman times.