Mines De RioTinto- The Mines of the Red River

 The Kids have the entire week off of school this week because it is Holy Week, so we have been trying to go and see some of the local attractions.  These are not the types of things that foreign tourist go to but things that the local people visit.
Today we focused on the Rio Tinto Mines.  As always if you want to know the full details about the mines you will need to do a google search but I will explain the things that I learned and thought was interesting.
First, people have been mining this area since Roman time, we went to a museum first that told us about the Roman mines that had been found in this area and it also had a replica of the mine for us to walk through,  it was well done and very cool.
Originally it was a normal underground mine and then in the late 1800 and British Group bought the entire thing and turned it into an open mine.

The water is Red coming from the ground water for the mine and the makeup of the water is so similar to findings on Mars that NASA is Studying the area to try and see how it is happening.  We were told not to touch the water because it would stain our clothes and told that the water had a PH Balance of  Coke, funny enough the boys had already named the river the Coke Cola  River.

We went to the mines with friends Laura and her son Mateo and it made it all the more fun

During our trip we took a train ride through a part of the open mines on the Train that was used 100 years ago to transport the workers.  It was old and it felt old. but it was also fun.