The Parco Miniere Lagorai in the Alta Valsugana covers a large area located at the extreme western side of the Lagorai-Cima d’Asta mountain range. An area where many geo-sites offer excellent keys to understanding the geological phenomena that are imprinted on the rocks and in the shapes of the land.
A land where people have benefited from a particularly generous substrate of mineral resources, which has guaranteed wealth and prosperity from prehistory to recent times.
The geo-mineral heritage of the Park is rich and the memory of the ancient mining events is still alive. Its legacy lives on in eight museum sites which are all Gates to the Lagorai Mining Park.
Open a Gate and begin the exciting journey to discover the past of ancient mines which still continues today through mineral collections and the nurturing of the culture of the ornamental stone quarries of Porfido Trentino and Rosso Trento.
Choose one of the trails which start from the museums and follow the panoramic routes to a land rich in natural beauty and mining history.
Get on your bike and enjoy the trip, visit the main attractions of the Park with the e-bike all in one go or in stages with the the E-bike Tour for a "slow" approach to the beauties of our land, along roads with little traffic and great landscapes.
E-bikes on the move: use them to explore our land without too much effort uphill and with utter fun downhill.
We have prepared the GPS tracks of the E-bike Tour by dividing it into individual sections which connect the different sites of the Park.
We know about the gold rush from old Western movies, but whether a rush or a run it is nevertheless an activity that literally breaks one’s back, today as in the olden times. In the Calisio mines, workers extracted from the silver-bearing galena and continued out of breath into the depths of the earth, and while the Italic peoples limited themselves to scratching the surface, eventually more daring miners came from the north of the Alps. In 1136 in Freiberg, in central Saxony, a very rich deposit of silver was discovered which attracted 30,000 miners in just 30 years. They were the Canopi (from the German Bergknappe = miner) recruited by the Prince Bishops but also pushed to the mountains by sheer hunger. They earned a living by digging into the ground and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. Very little is known of them. Perhaps they were something like the fairy gnomes. It is believed they were short, that they often travelled with their back bent forwards carrying a lantern. They protected their heads from the water dripping from the stones with pointed caps which also warned them of the limit of the "ceilings" of the galleries so they wouldn’t hit their heads. Their clothes were comfortable, probably large smocks which did not impair movement despite the humidity and cold; they also wore a leather apron, the "batticulo", which allowed them to sit and let the water drip from their backs. They lived in temporary shacks and when they discovered the inns in Pergine they fell in love with wine, spending and frittering away the little money they had earned. It is known though that a gold or silver rush can become a fever and the hope of finding the biggest nugget made men bold and pockets bottomless.