Berbes, Ribadesella, Spain

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Veronique and I visited Berbes on 25/6 and 26/6 2003 and found nice purple, green, blue and white Fluorit, Quartz, Baryt and also Malachit and Azurit. Yes, I have heard of and seen much better pieces, but I do not use hydraulic hammers, but only my own muscles...

Fluorit is easy to find, although it's difficult to find undamaged xls. The rock is very hard and the xls break off easy. Try to find a hole with Fluorit-xls with a large hammer, only able to hammer one time ;-). I killed more pieces than I carefully wrapped in paper to take home...
You also want to climb a few meters up the walls to reach the still interesting area's, and go underground !

I was surprised, and not surprised at the same time, to find primary mineralisations here of Chalkopyrit, Tennantit-Tetraedrit, Galenit, Pyrit here, and corresponding secondary minerals like 'Malachit' (also in 'locken') and 'Azurit'. I don't know yet for sure what secondary minerals of course: everything green and blue can be almost anything...
The 'Malachit' formed needles but also very nice perfectly corkscrewed crystals to 1 cm long !! (Like known from Schwaz-Brixlegg, Austria). The 'Azurit' were usually just crusts, but to the blue of the rare xls it might also be something else...

Warning ;-)
Please please wear a helmet here. We took 4 helmets with us, and left them in the car (stupid, stupid...).
The rockwalls are very unstable...
So... Veronique was hit on her head by a rock and ended up in hospital with two large stitches... :-( Lucky to be alive actually (one stitch is 5 cm long). It bleeded like hell and we were quite in a hurry to reach the hospital in Ribadesella by car... !

But, we went climbing again 2 days later, and 7 days later the stitches were removed in Ribadesella, and we're on the move again like nothing happened ;-)

If you're searching for mineralogical articles on this locality (gea-1992-01-12-spanje, lapis-2002-09-13-fluorit etc...), please contact us...

Also see: mineralesespana, topmin.de, fluorit.granat.at.

mindat.org on this location.

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