Miniere di Cogne

Above Cogne, inside Monte Creya, the magnetite mines closed in 1979 after generations of work in one of Italy's notable iron-ore districts.

Why it matters

The Cogne mines worked magnetite deposits on Monte Creya, from the high basins of Liconi, Colonna and Costa del Pino. Their history runs from the first written record of iron ore at Liconi in 1432 to the industrial age, when the Società Anonima Minere di Cogne and later the nationalised Cogne company made the valley one of Italy's iron suppliers. In 1940 a thousand miners extracted 350,000 tons of ore; by 1975 the workforce had fallen to 250, and the mines closed for good in 1979.

What to notice

At Costa del Pino, an intermediate station of the mine at about 2,031 metres, the miners' train — a small yellow machine from the 1950s — and the galleries preserve the scale of the excavation and the working conditions underground. Surface relics complete the picture: the cableway structures that carried ore down the mountain, the passenger ropeway to Colonna, and the buildings of the mining settlement. The galleries' constant temperature of about seven degrees reflects the miners' underground working conditions.

Context and history

The ore bodies of Liconi, Colonna and Costa del Pino fed an industry that shaped the whole valley. The mines belonged to the Bishop before being sold to the Municipality of Cogne in 1679 for three hundred Spanish gold pistoles; in the early 1800s Dr. Emmanuel César Grappein introduced community-based management; the modern era began in 1898 when the Belgian Alfred Theys took over — the Società Anonima Minere di Cogne followed in 1907. Ansaldo acquired the operation in 1917 and built the steelworks in Aosta, linked to the mine by the Gilardi narrow-gauge railway — 11,645 metres long, with more than eight kilometres tunnelled under the Drinc hill, at the time the longest narrow-gauge line in Europe. Nationalised management from 1927 brought the peak years of the 1930s and 1940s, then decline as competing ore undercut Cogne's magnetite. Closure came in 1979, and in 2017 guided visits of the Costa del Pino galleries opened the mine's next life.