Panorama Photo

The mountain above Piscinas, called Montevecchio, is rich in metals, and at the end of the XIX century English engineers opened two different quarries, at Ingurtosu and Gennamari. Silver, lead and zinc were extracted here until 1968.
The Brassey washery, that is, the place were the excavated rock was filtered, was built here in Naracauli, halfway between Ingurtosu and Piscinas, the latter being the place (see N. 12108) where the metals reached the sea, carried by a little railway whose remains are piecewise still visible.
Now the mines of the Sulcis-Iglesiente region, because of their character of "an industry abandoned in nature, in a surreal dimension, outside the flow of time" have been declared a Unesco world heritage site.
Ingurtosu is interesting in its own because it hosts the Palazzo della Direzione, that is, the headquarters of the mines, built by a German architect who was born in Eisenach (no, his name was not J. S. B. , of course...), and thus used the Wartburg as a model (!!). This can be seen in www.panoramio.com/photo/84939469 and www.panoramio.com/photo/85374859.
In 1978 the Italian band "I nomadi" published an album titled "Naracauli e altre storie" (and other stories), with the first song, Naracauli, telling the story of shepherds who have abandoned their animals to search a better job in the mineral industry, and at a certain point find themselves unemployed.
The modern local industry, that is, the one that has replaced what we see here, has its own problems, too. On December 31, 2012, right I was in these places, in his end-of-year speech the Italian president Napolitano spent some words about this region: perhaps the most heavily hit by the current economic crisis.
A last note about names. I was not able to find the origin of the name Naracauli. Ingurtosu, however, comes from "su gurturgiu", the name, in Sardinian dialect, of a vulture which populated the region. "Gennamari", on the other hand, is almost pure Latin, Genna being a corruption of the term "ianua", meaning "door", the name of every mountain pass on the island. Here, we have "ianua maris", that is, "door of the sea".
Sardinian, Italian, Latin, German, English... which is then the nationality of this incredible abandoned place?