Floristella and Grottacalda mining park
Davide Mauro - CC4.0
The Floristella Mining Park in Valguarnera brings together the two disused sulfur mines of the same name, and represents one of the most important industrial archeology sites existing in Southern Italy and one of the largest, oldest and most significant sulfur mining areas of Sicily.
It is a large open-air museum, in whose territory the sulfur mining activity is documented from the end of the 1700s to 1986, the year in which the mining area ceased definitely any activity related to sulfur production. It provides a real stratigraphy of the different eras and the related systems and techniques for the extraction and smelting of sulfur.
Inside the park, the galleries, the calcaroni, i.e. the circular furnaces for smelting, are still clearly visible and separation of the sulfur from the inert material, the shafts, i.e. the semi-vertical tunnels used in the pre-industrial era to reach the deposit, the vertical extraction well systems with small castles complete with winch rooms, used in recent times for the descent underground, the furnaces Gill, the most modern system for the smelting of sulphur, the internal railway network for the transport of the wagons with the ore and the railway line between the stations of Floristella and Grottacalda through which the sulfur was loaded and shipped.
The Park it also presents significant landscape and naturalistic aspects: a source of sulphurous water that feeds the Floristella stream, continuous emissions of methane and salty and ferruginous water, gushing out with a small flow rate from some nearby mouths called Maccalube or small mud volcanoes, visible in the northern part of the park area.
Palazzo Pennisi stands imposingly on a hill, the former residence of the owner family, which dominates the Floristella mining complex.
