The Rammelsberg

A thousand unbroken years of silver, and the emperors it paid for

The Rammelsberg rises 635 metres on the northern edge of the Harz, just south of Goslar in Lower Saxony. Its ore formed on a sea floor. In the Devonian, hot metal-bearing springs vented on the bottom of the sea and laid down two large lenses of massive sulphide, which the folding of the Carboniferous later tipped over at an angle inside the mountain. The ore averaged 14 percent zinc, 6 percent lead and 2 percent copper, with 140 grams of silver and a gram of gold to the tonne.

Legend gives the mountain to a knight called Ramm, one of Otto the Great's men. Hunting in 968, he tied his horse to a tree to follow deer on foot, and the impatient horse pawed the ground and exposed a vein of silver ore. The likelier source of the name is an old word for copper-bearing ore. The chronicler Widukind of Corvey recorded Otto having silver veins opened around 968, but ore and slag excavated at Düna point to mining in the late seventh century, and the Old Orebody, exposed by erosion, was worked as early as the Bronze Age.

The metal made Goslar rich. In 1005 Henry II built the Imperial Palace at the foot of the mountain, and the mines stayed imperial property. When Barbarossa refused Henry the Lion the Goslar mines in return for his support in 1175, the duke besieged the town and had the mine works demolished. Goslar's council bought the mining rights in 1359. In 1376 more than 100 miners were buried and killed in an accident. The town lost the mines in 1552 to Duke Henry V of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; they passed to Hanover in 1814 and to Prussia in 1866, and in 1936-37 the Nazi government expanded them for its war economy, with surface buildings by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, architects of the Zollverein colliery.

Preussag closed the mine on 30 June 1988, after more than 1,000 years and almost 30 million tonnes of ore, the only mine that had worked continuously for so long. A citizens' association fought plans to demolish the surface plant and fill the old workings, and the mine became a museum and visitor mine. UNESCO inscribed it with Goslar's old town in 1992 and in 2010 extended the site to the Upper Harz water management system, some 800 years of ponds, channels, tunnels and drains. Underground survive the Roeder Gallery with its water wheels, the Feuergezäher Vault, the oldest masonry-lined mining space in Central Europe, and the Rathstiefste Gallery, crusted with coloured vitriol. On the surface, the Master Malter's Tower of about 1500 is probably the oldest mine building in Germany.