environment          

On the sur face, you can still see the remains of the exploitation of these seams, the so-called "outcrop", mined as the result of a landslip which appears as a great wound opened along the North-Western slopes of the small range of mountains which divides the area of Arbus from that of Casargius-Montevecchio.The rest of these mountains is in part covered by Mediterranean bush with ilex and cork trees, as well as some recently planted pine woods which have managed to survive the savage destruction of the woods caused each summer by the brush fires, often deliberately set.The group of seams mined at Montevecchio lies tangentially to the granite rnass of the Arburese area and appears to consist of filling by mineral fluids of a long fault which opened in the quartz schists as a result of the cooling and subsequent contraction of the associ-ated granite.
In the offices of the mine, on the first floor in the geological office the visitor will find an interesting small museum which holds examples of the most common minerals to be found in the mine. Amongst these we should mention some samples of green anglesite, some cerussites, barite covered in smali grains of ferriferous smithsonite otherwise known as monheimite. Rare samples which are well represented are the colloform blendes with small cubic hopper crystals of bismuth galena and small, almost acicular barite. The minerals which the Montevecchio mine has produced over the years are very numerous. Many of them cannot be found by means of personal search since they come from the shafts with depths of 288 mts below sea level (Sartori shaft, the pride and joy of the - at that time - extremely modem and ad-vanced mine of Montevecchio).