At the entrance, we found a gift shop, a ticket office and a place to get a snack. They told us 300-500 visitors come here every day! There were lots of families here today, in fact we met an LDS family from Chile who saw our nametags and stopped to say hello.
In this mine, they made all the passages big enough for guests to walk through (the miners crawled), in fact, it took one man 1 year to chip out 1 meter of stone one meter high. It was rough work. The miners only lived to be 35-45 years old. They worked in the dark with oil lamps, trying to find geodes in the stone, then they’d chip them out and sent them whole to the cutters in town.
Here’s this mine today with the path we followed. At the top are the natural lakes (pure water drips down through the stone from above).
There’s a fun video of walking through the mine here:
As we walked through this interesting place, we saw lots of geodes embedded in the stone and also others that had been placed here to show us the various types of gems found here.
We learned that miners would follow veins in the stone, marked by the geodes and the shape of the geodes that pointed the direction of the lava flow.
Here’s the crystal clear lake:
The gemstone below looks like raw meat:
The tour lasted about an hour. It was so interesting. I learned things I didn’t know before.
After this mine experience we drove down into town and spent the rest of the day wandering there.
Our Frankfurt Germany Mission 