Lavrio Ancient Silver Mines

The Lavrion district held rich veins of argentiferous lead, and from the sixth century BC Athens mined them on an industrial scale with thousands of workers, most of them enslaved, cutting narrow galleries and vertical shafts through the limestone. The silver paid for the fleet and for much of the city's public building. What survives across the hills is remarkable and largely unmanaged: shaft mouths, gallery entrances, and above all the ore-washing installations, rectangular cisterns and sloped floors with channels where crushed ore was washed with recycled water, the best preserved industrial installations of the ancient Greek world. At Thorikos the same hill holds an unusual rectangular ancient theatre. Nineteenth-century French mining works, with their own ruins, overlie the ancient ones.

What you actually see

• The washeries - sloped floors, channels and cisterns for washing ore.
• The gallery mouths - ancient shaft and tunnel entrances in the hillsides.
• The Thorikos theatre - a rare rectangular ancient theatre above the site.
• The industrial ruins - nineteenth-century French mining buildings.

When to go

Autumn to spring; the hills are dry, exposed and hot in summer, with no shade. Winter light suits the ruins and the ground is easier to walk.

Honest expectations

Most of the district is open, unsigned and unguarded, and old shafts are genuinely dangerous, so do not enter any tunnel. A car and a map are needed to find the scattered sites. The modern town of Lavrio is industrial.

Nearby

Cape Sounion is twenty minutes south; the Lavrio ferry port serves Kea and Kythnos.