Las Médulas
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- May–September
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The Romans took mountains apart at Las Médulas. From the 1st century CE, engineers channelled water through tunnels to blast apart the gold-bearing hills of northwest Spain — ruina montium, mining by hydraulic force — until they abandoned the exhausted workings two centuries on. Because industry never returned, the wreckage endures in strange beauty: sheer red crags, collapsed galleries and chestnut groves over the old tailings. UNESCO inscribed the landscape in 1997.
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