Any mention of mining in the hallowed precincts of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is guaranteed to elicit a mixed reaction. Some will be quick to point out that the extractive industries pose a significant threat to some of the sites featured on the World Heritage List. Others will counter with the argument that those same industries have over the centuries created some of the world’s most distinctive cultural landscapes, a number of which have provided wonderful additions to the World Heritage List.
A case in point is the World Heritage designation in 2006 of the former mining landscapes of the Tamar Valley and Cornwall in south-west England. Within a relatively brief period from the mid 18th century, this region developed a huge share in the world’s copper, tin and arsenic trade. The creative ingenuity which underpinned the Cornish mining industry had profound effects on global trade and has left a very distinctive landscape. The last mine closed only in 1998, and those who worked at South Crofty could surely never have imagined that within a very few years the remains of Cornish mining and the landscapes they shaped would sit alongside the Acropolis in Athens and the Taj Mahal in India on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
As it happens, Britain’s most recent World Heritage listing also relates to the extractive industries. It focuses on the slate landscapes of north-west Wales with their monumental quarries and mines. That citation comprises six separate spots across the county of Gwynedd which were added to the World Heritage List in 2021.
The lure of gold
Another site with a mining dimension secured a coveted spot on the UNESCO List last year. High in the hills of Transylvania is the community of Roşia Montană — a place tucked away in a natural amphitheatre in the Apuseni Mountains. This is the planet’s most comprehensive former Roman gold mining site. It is industrial archaeology on a grand scale in one of Europe’s oldest documented mining communities. Two millennia of gold mining have created a remarkable cultural history which finds expression in the landscapes in and around Roşia Montană.
It all sounds extremely appealing, and so perhaps no surprise that, after some years of effective lobbying by the Romanian authorities, Roşia Montană eventually made the grade for acceptance onto the UNESCO List. While many in Bucharest were delighted, the mayor of Roşia Montană expressed disappointment at UNESCO’s decision. “It will just bring problems,” said Eugen Furdui, who is a keen supporter of a Canadianfunded initiative to greatly expand mining in and around Roşia Montană.
The Romanian town has been at the centre of environmental debates which go right back to the Ceauşescu era. Industrial scale mining at Roşia Montană ended in 2006, just before Romania joined the European Union. But there are many, including the town’s mayor and many former miners, who would dearly like to see the mine reopened. So although Roşia Montană secured a place on the World Heritage List it was also immediately placed on UNESCO’s heritage-in-danger watch list. The inscription of Roşia Montană thus perfectly illustrates the double-edged relationship between mining and heritage. There are two other European properties on that red list, namely the historic centre of Vienna (red-listed in 2017) and the mediaeval monuments of Kosovo (red-listed in 2006).
The population of Roşia Montană, often referred to as Rosieni, is deeply divided with conflicting narratives which raise fundamental questions about environmental justice and a community’s right to tell its own story and determine its own future. Unsurprisingly, these are precisely the recurring issues which have influenced UNESCO debates over the relationship between extractive industries and cultural heritage. There were some in northern France who were bemused when in 2012 the mining heritage of the Calais region was inscribed on the UNESCO List. Others saw it as a valorisation of the distinctive social fabric and solidarity that developed in the area’s coal mining communities. The international media were not always complimentary. The CNN headline ran thus: “Coal slag heaps join pyramids on World Heritage List.”
The inscription of Roşia Montană perfectly illustrates the double-edged relationship between mining and heritage.
UNESCO had pledged to take another look at Roşia Montană this summer, but the scheduled review has been deferred in the fallout from the cancellation of the proposed meeting in Kazan of the World Heritage Committee. 2022 was shaping up to be a big year for UNESCO, it being the 50th anniversary of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. But with the Russian Federation currently holding the chair of the World Heritage Committee, there’s been a delicate diplomatic dance around the proposed summer bash in Tatarstan, which is one of the republics in the Russian Federation. “Heritage is definitely on hold,” said one UNESCO spokesperson, reflecting the official position that the 2022 meeting is “indefinitely postponed.”
So we must await the next round of deliberations on Roşia Montană, which could still find itself struck entirely from the World Heritage List if UNESCO deems that the conservation needs of the site are being wantonly ignored. Liverpool and Dresden are the only European places ever to have lost an entry on the list.
Tourism assets
Meanwhile, in the German city of Goslar on the northern flank of the Harz Mountains, there is general civic satisfaction to see the crowds of visitors returning after the COVID interregnum. When the town’s Rammelsberg mine closed, it marked the end of a thousand years of uninterrupted mining activity in Goslar. Copper, lead and zinc brought prosperity to the town. The last minerals were brought to surface on 30 June 1988, after which attention turned to stabilising and preserving the mining infrastructure. It took only four years to secure an initial inscription on the World Heritage List, focusing on Goslar’s importance in the mining of non-ferrous metals and the ingenious water management that underpinned mining activities. Three decades on, the former mining complex is a hugely popular tourist destination that attracts visitors from near and far.
There are a good number of European entries on the World Heritage List which showcase the extractive industries. Among them are the Neolithic flint mines at Spiennes in Belgium, the Royal Saltworks of Arcet- Senans near Besançon in France, and the former mining complex at Tarnowskie Góry in Poland where, as in Goslar, water management techniques were central to the inscription. All of them have profited from the inscription and in each case tourism activities have developed around the UNESCO listings. These examples, and others like them, offer a variety of models that could be used at Roşia Montană. Only time will tell whether the conflict of interest around that newly listed Romanian gold mine can be resolved and if it will reap the benefits from having secured a place on the UNESCO list.
The map marks the location of Roşia Montană where in the surrounding hills gold has been mined for two thousand years.
