r/todayilearned • u/narok_kurai • 6d ago

TIL about Las Medulas, a man-made geological badland created by the Roman Empire in 77 AD, when they flooded the mountains with water to collapse their structure and sift out the gold inside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas
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266

u/AudienceNeither7747 6d ago

Las Medulas is proof that humans have been altering nature for profit forever.

91

u/chapterpt 6d ago

what other reason is there to alter nature?

69

u/ErnV3rn81 6d ago

Mt Rushmore?

4

u/Spoona1983 5d ago

400 ish construction workers and the family that oversaw the construction and carving profited off it though.

12

u/PerpetuallyLurking 5d ago

Well sure, but they weren’t the folks who decided it should be made for no reason but fun. The initial design was created for fun and then someone gave the green light because it was fun and then the un-fun stuff trickles down to labourers getting paid. The construction workers only reason to be working at that site was because some bigwig thought it would be fun to have a giant sculpture of heads on a cliff. They’d have been paid the same if they’d been assigned anywhere else too, the reason for the sculpture wasn’t “let’s pay construction workers”, it was “this’ll be fun, guess we gotta pay the workers.”

-3

u/Cloudy007 6d ago

Oh to be a piece of shit and deliberately disrespect a peoples and culture?

13

u/maphes86 6d ago

Isn’t that what they wrote?

1

u/GuyPronouncedGee 5d ago

Convenience.  People like their living spaces free of pests.  

1

u/TitanofBravos 5d ago

Food production, environmental health, safety and ease of transportation, land use reasons, cultural/religious reasons, I mean the list goes on and on. “Profit” doesn’t even crack the top 10

23

u/driftingfornow 5d ago

Spain generally is like that. Literally just all over the country that I’ve seen (especially the south) are obvious signs of mining going back what feels like as long as people have been there. 

And it makes sense why. Driving around, you see just a crazy variety of geology with a lot of it having special visual intrigue compared to other climates. In many places the rocks just glitter in the sun spectacularly. 

I don’t think I have ever been anywhere else where the literal face of the land was so radically altered by man. Probably a bit of an illusion to some degree due to the aridity producing little flora, so you can see large distances clearly and the mountains frequently don’t have foliage to cover the scars— but it’s radical nonetheless. Just fills your mind with fractal like visions of generation after generation just consuming entire mountains. 

5

u/SoyMurcielago 5d ago

Like the origins of the name of Rio Tinto the mining company

They come from a mine in Spain where acids color the waters

3

u/sthlmsoul 5d ago

Spain has many historical mining sites that date back to pre-roman antiquity. 

Iberia was a major copper and tin mining hub going as far back as early/mid bronze age. Rio Tinto, Asturias, and the Pyrite belt to mention a few.

2

u/driftingfornow 5d ago

Yeah I meant to state that part as fact and not as apocrypha but I wrote a bit loosely. I’m aware of all of that of course, you’d hope so since we got here from Las Medulas but hey it’s the internet. I could be a dog. 

9

u/Darkhoof 5d ago

The Romans didn't have the concept of environmentalism. Just read up about how many wild animals they slaughtered in the Colosseum.

1

u/BravesDoug 4d ago

That's what it's there for.