Cercs and Fumanya
We’ve prepared the perfect morning if you’re doing this trip with children. But if not, you’re sure to enjoy it anyway! You can go to Sant Corneli de Cercs. Here, at an altitude of 920 metres, the mine exploited for over 140 years by the company Carbons de Berga, SA filled this place with life. Life, and also death, because as everyone knows the working conditions of miners were harsh and many lost their lives underground. The visit to the Mines de Cercs remembers and pays tribute to them, and reveals a lot about coal mining and life in the colony. It was one of the most important colonies in Catalonia: around 3,000 people lived there at its peak. Today, it still has around one hundred residents.
Before you enter the mine, you can explore the museum, which has a wide-ranging and informative exhibition. It reproduces areas of the mining colony such as a school classroom and a dispensary, and right next to the museum you can enter a worker’s house from the 1940s. And now the time has come to put on your helmet, jump on the train and enter the mine!
When you’ve finished, we invite you to go even further back in time: to the era of dinosaurs! Only 7 kilometres from the mines is the paleontological site of Fumanya, the largest European site with sauropod footprints from the Upper Cretaceous and one of the most important in the world. Visiting the Interpretation Centre you’ll discover that the relationship between these ‘little animals’ and coal is much closer than we might first think: the open-pit mining carried out here between 1975 and 1986 uncovered dinosaur tracks, over 3,500!, and showed that dinosaurs disappeared over 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, the period when the lignite was formed and the geomorphological formation of the Pyrenees developed. The Fumanya site, located in the municipal district of Fígols, is a Cultural Asset of National Interest and aspires to be listed as a Natural World Heritage Site by UNESCO.