» Quarrying over the centuries

Marble was first extracted from this quarry in the year 1883 when Josef Lechner, a true marble pioneer, rented the quarry from the Laas (Lasa) council. He was the first to actually quarry marble here on an industrial scale. The marble was hacked away from the rock face above it by sheer force using iron tools called “Schroatn” and from the underlying strata by the use of iron rods which were hammered into the rock to a depth of some 30 centimetres, using a tool known as a “Keiltasche”. Later, hand drills and then compression drills were used to cut holes in the rock into which wooden rods were inserted so as to make a ledge under the marble in such a way that the stone could be chipped away to free the marble deposit on top of it. Dynamite was used during the 1930s but this led to a lot of fine marble being wasted or damaged by cracks and surface splits. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when there was very little marble left to be extracted by open mining and when some snow avalanches often halted work at the rock face, miners started cutting it from tunnel galleries deep inside the mountain. The marble was hewn from terraces cut into the rock face along corridors, tunnels and galleries which burrowed deep down to two, three or more levels and in every possible direction. Visitors to the mine were shocked to see how far this warren of empty chambers extended - some were at least 40 metres high, more than 100 metres long and an average 30 metres in width! Today, an enormous system of tunnels, galleries and corridors cuts into the heart of the mountain and, after decades of mining, the opening of the quarry looks like an enormous mouth with doors as large as those of the biggest aircraft hanger ever seen. Enormous lights illuminate the surrounding area reflecting the glossy marble surfaces, walls and floor while, day and night, marble blocks some weighing as much as six hundred tons and measuring two hundred square metres, are cut away from the bare rock face. A new cutting technique had to be invented in order to allow the extraction of such enormous blocks - steel cables which run on hubs are inserted into the marble rock and quartz sand and water are used to cut the marble blocks free from the surrounding rock. Using this system for the first time, an eight hundred ton piece of rock was removed in 1934 and laid to rest on a bed of gravel to be cut into smaller pieces which were then put on the market.