Basque Country’s Mining Museum

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Mining museum in Gallarta

Basque Country's Mining Museum is the centre dedicated to the study and dissemination of the culture and history knowledge of the mining in the Basque Country as a whole and the mining area of Bizkaia in particular. It is located in the town of Gallarta, birthplace of Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria"), its famous syndicalist daughter and fervent advocate of miners' rights, in "Las Encartaciones" of Bizkaia, Basque Country, next to the great mass of open cast iron-working. Here in Gallarta too is the deepest open cast mine excavation, in the whole of the Basque Country, extending to 20 meters below sea level.

The Mining Museum Cultural Association, a non-profit making organization created in 1986 and manned by volunteers, has been taken charge of compiling and collating all the material and documentation relating to the old mines of Bizkaia. It has also been the entity that has pricked the conscience of institutions with its vision of the Basque Country's own Mining Museum, which is nowadays a reality.

Over a period of fifteen years, the Mining Museum Association has amassed a great number of pieces, tools, machinery and documents from the old iron workings, all of which will be on display in the Museum itself. One of the highlights is the largest collection in the Basque Country of light trucks and wagons used the iron ore.

Another outstanding exhibit is an aerial bucket ropeway, comprising several sections, which has been restored to full working order. There are also ore washeries and other examples of the machines used in Bizkaia's historic mining. Featured among the lesser exhibits are items of daily use as lamps, "txoklos" (typical footwear), theodolites, rock drills, long-handled spoons (used to extract unexploded dynamite from charge-holes), wagon-counting abacus , masks, etc..

In many cases, these pieces may well be the sole-surviving ones from the Golden Age of the mining in Bizkaia (late 19th to early 20th century). Likewise, it is also worth a mentioning the mine painting collections-works of art carried out by knowledge artists representing their vision of the mines.