» The marble from the Lasa valley

It is easy to see why the eastern part of the romantic Laas (Lasa) valley is also known as the “marble mountains” and it seems that the four hundred million year old deposits will go on forever. Long before marble was quarried on a large scale here, local people hauled blocks of it down into the valley and collected what fell down the side of the Jenn mountain (Jennwand-Ries) of its own accord. It is not known for sure how long this kind of activity continued but we find crude marble blocks and sheets used for the construction of various Romanesque churches with their statues and portal entrance arches as well as door arches from the VIII and IX centuries and even earlier boundary stones and menhir dating from the Neolithic and pre-Christian eras. More recently, a group of dynamic businessmen re-opened the Laas (Lasa) quarries and the Weißwasser (White Water) quarry remains the area’s main source of marble.