A Hill Full of Holes

The hillside above the village is not really a hillside any more. It is a hill full of holes.

They are dug by hand and they go straight down. From the air they look like a scatter of dark coins across roughly a square kilometre of green slope, and the people who work up there will tell you there are about two thousand of them. Around every hole is a small platform of bare red earth, a rope, a wheel and a bucket.

Everything here is done by hand, and there is a reason for it. Larimar breaks. It sits inside the old rock in pockets and veins, and a machine, or a charge of explosive, would shatter the very thing it was sent to collect. So the miners use picks and iron bars and their own arms. Rock goes up in the bucket. Men go down on the rope. The only engines on the whole hill are small generators, and they are there to run a light and to push air along a pipe to the bottom, because some of these shafts are said to drop more than sixty metres into the mountain.

It is hard work and it is genuinely dangerous. In twenty twenty two the mine was closed for a while after three miners were killed, and it opened again only with new rules about how the shafts are watched and held up. Polly settles on the lip of one platform while a bucket comes up out of the dark, gritty and streaming water, and a man tips it onto the heap and begins sorting through it with his fingers.