On the southwestern slopes of Żeleźniak (666 m above sea level) in the Kaczawskie Mountains, there is a picturesque village of Radzimowice, consisting of only a dozen or so houses. The modest buildings in no way betray the rich history of this place. For many years, this area housed one of the largest and oldest centers of ore mining in the Lower Silesia. It’s hard to imagine that for many years, the settlement named Stara Góra (Altenberg), as Radzimowice was once called, operated as a mining town with several mines, its own mining office, and in the 19th century, it also had an arsenic smelter and a mining tavern.
The remains of the former mining, whose first records can be found in the 13th-century books, are clustered on the southern and eastern slopes of Żeleźniak (666 m above sea level) in the vicinity of the former mining fields named Louis and Arnold, located approximately 800 m to the NE and 250 m to the NW of Radzimowice, along the yellow and blue tourist trails. An inquisitive tourist will find numerous spoil heaps, sinkholes, and remnants of mining shafts, where you can come across bats.
Mining works were conducted in the vicinity of Radzimowice in metamorphic (transformed) rocks of the Kaczawa unit, which are intersected by smaller veins of the so-called intrusions of Żeleźniak. Metamorphic rocks forming the Kaczawa unit are classified in the Cambrian to early Carboniferous age range. The intrusion of Żeleźniak, cutting through the older rocks of the Kaczawa unit, is composed of solidified, acidic magma (rhyolitic and rhyodacitic) rich in silica (SiO2). It is to this magma, which intruded into the older rocks of the Kaczawa unit about 315 million years ago, during the geological period known as the Late Carboniferous, that we owe the formation of metal deposits in the vicinity of Radzimowice. The veins branching off from the Żeleźniak intrusion penetrated the older rocks, and as hot solutions circulated through fractures and fissures in the rocks, numerous minerals rich in gold, silver, copper, and lead were deposited. Six main ore veins were identified here with evocative names: “Miner’s Consolation,” “Olga,” “Wanda,” “Klara,” “Maria,” and “Aleksandra.” They have a thickness ranging from 6 cm to 1.4 m. Already in the 17th century, over 1.5 tons of copper ore and 10 tons of arsenic, silver, and lead ore were obtained from the veins. Some estimates suggest that from the early 19th century to the early 20th century, approximately 2000 tons of refined copper were obtained. The mines in Radzimowice were closed in 1925. The underground mines were accessible through vertical shafts and branching tunnels. The exits of two vertical shafts (Louis and Arnold) have been preserved to this day and are covered with metal grates. The adits accessed through the shafts are currently inaccessible. Next to the shafts, there are numerous heaps where one can find metallic minerals occurring most frequently in veins cutting through the Radzimowice schists. Among the most commonly encountered minerals are gold, glistening pyrite, chalcopyrite, silvery arsenopyrite, galena, sphalerite, magnetite, hematite, and others. From the heaps in Radzimowice, numerous currently forming minerals of weathering origin, known as supergene minerals, have also been described.
