The calendar for the new school year is once again full of interesting activities. One of them will be the Erasmus+ mobility program in the Spanish city of Almadén, where a youth conference will be held in October to mark the 500th anniversary of the Fugger family’s arrival in Spain. The theme of the conference will be mercury, as Almadén was one of the largest and most important mercury deposits in the world in the past.
In order to prepare well for this mobility program, we also set out to follow the traces of mercury in the vicinity of our city. It is not only the name Jakub Fugger that connects us to Almadén, but also mercury mining. Our guide was Doc. RNDr. Stanislav Jeleň, CSc from the Department of Geography and Geology at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica. The docent took us to places that are historically closely connected with mining, such as the Veľká studňa deposit. He told us many interesting facts, helping us to rediscover our own region, and finally showed us how to pan for cynabar from the local stream in Malachovo. It is not an easy topic, but through all these activities, we are discovering that the history of our own town and its surroundings is extremely interesting and deserves our greater attention. We are already looking forward to presenting our findings and experiences at the conference in Almadén. To get a better look at the “catches” from the local stream, we visited the Department of Geography and Geology, where Doc. Jeleň and his doctoral student explained how to work with a microscope and create enlarged photographs of crystals from panned samples.
We continued exploring our region and preparing for our trip to Spain at the Barbakan. Ms. Marta Mlíchová, an academic sculptor, guided us through the entire exhibition and offered us a very interesting and comprehensive look at the mining history of our town and its surroundings. The exhibition also featured personalities such as the first mayor Ondrej, Ján Thurzo, and Jakub Fugger. We learned about the foreign sea voyages that our copper undertook as far back as the 15th century, played miners with a new interactive game, and saw a visualization of the Copper Hammer in the present and its glorious past in Peterman’s Tower. The two hours in the exhibition passed incredibly quickly. We will be processing the wealth of interesting information we learned for a long time to come. However, we are now much richer in knowledge, and our preparation for the Spanish mobility will be much easier.
