THE STORY OF GOLD AT LAKE ARENAL
For thousands of years the various Indian tribes of Central America have been mining gold through simple methods of shallow surface mining and panning. And there is evidence of this in many of the graves that have been excavated with small amounts of gold mainly in the graves of the nobles and caciques. The gold museum in San Jose has some excellent examples of this.
But our story begins with the purchase of 40,000 hectares of land in the Tilaran Mountains by an American named Minor Keith in the late 1800,s. Minor Keith in 1884 had made a deal with the Costa Rican Government to construct a narrow gauge railway from San Jose to Limon in exchange for 300,000 hectares of land on the Atlantic coast that later became The United Fruit Company.
His company was called Abangares Mining Company and the first mine he opened was in Las Juntas de Abangares. Later other mines were opened, two very close to Lake Arenal. A mines which closed fairly recently was located in Rio Chiquito on the south side of the Lake. The mine shaft has been dynamited shut, but all the machinery and smelter is still there. It was recently sold to a farmer for cattle grazing.
Another mine, with more historical significance was situated in the small town of Libano, which is 5 miles south of the town of Tilaran and about 40 minutes from the Lake. The Libano mine was opened in 1911 and finally closed in the late 1970,s not due to the lack of gold but because the price of gold dropped below the break even point where it became profitable to mine at $485 per ounce.
It took one ton of excavated rock to produce one half ounce of gold. The mining was done by hand, pick and shovel in hot narrow mines that went straight into a mountain side rather than down. They could only dig as far as the water table which was usually the elevation of the nearest river because they did not have the expensive pumping equipment to mine below this point.
The earliest mines were done with very primitive methods, crushing the extracted rock in large rocks which have been hollowed out and crushed mortar and pestle style, then treated with cyanide before smelting. If you go to Libano you can still see the old rusting machinery used in the mines and there is an old bar there where the miners would ease their weary backs after long hours in the mine.
I have purchased many of these interesting relics and artifacts from the Libano mine and they adorn the Gingerbread Restaurant grounds.
The written accounts depict the tough physical work of the miners and the tribulations to survive those hard existences.
Desperate men who were going through hard economic times for them and their families and end up working as miners because they could not find any other type of employment in the city. Despite the grueling hard work that the mines demanded, it still allowed many families to eat, particularly for people who hardly knew how to read and write.
Those who went to work for the mines were young, others middle age and some, pretty old. Some of them were physically strong. Some were slender and small built, others average in size, but the majority of them had a strong preference for hard work and for a hard living.
The conditions which miners had to endure were harsh to say the least The hours were long and so were the days. They worked under physically exhausting conditions being constantly exposed to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and different rashes and skin diseases. The miners spend the day crawling in wet, dark, bat and tarantula ridden tunnels. Rheumatic pain afflicted their sore muscles and aching joints and the long squatting and crawling inside tunnels carrying heavy buckets of ore or pushing heavy small gauge train carts stiffen their backs for hours.
The last General Manager of the mine at Libano who lives in Tilaran and was gracious enough to provide me with much of the information on the mine there said there is still a lot of gold to be had. And now with the price of gold hovering at $1000 per ounce, well, anyone feel like getting into the gold mining business.
