Rioseco · ES

Minas prehistóricas de Texeo

On the high eastern flank of the Sierra del Aramo, above the concejo of Riosa in central Asturias, the Texeo Prehistoric Mines are one of the oldest mining sites in Europe. Long before the Romans chased gold across the Iberian north-west, Chalcolithic and Bronze-Age miners were tunnelling into this limestone mountainside for copper, working the seams between roughly 2,500 and 1,400 BC. The name itself, Texeo, comes from the yews (texos / tejos) that once thickened the slopes of the Aramo. Today the place is reached on foot through a layered landscape: a beautifully preserved 19th-century British mining village at Rioseco, a sculptural modern viewpoint over the old processing plant, and a steep cobbled path that climbs past abandoned galleries and water works up to the prehistoric workings themselves. It is a rare kind of hike where you pass through four and a half millennia of human labour in a single afternoon, ending among stone pillars and blue-tinged mineral seams that the very first Asturian miners left standing.