Minas del Aguacate are a series of antique goldmines that are no longer active located in San Mateo, western Costa Rica. Gold hasn’t been extracted in this region for a very long time, for this reason, there are a few remains distributed in many private properties and in the surroundings of the Quebrada Honda river, thus being of public access.
Lately, I have had the possibility of going in a recurrent way and entered with a local into one of those private properties. He showed us old structures that were used to clean and to grind the extracted gold (fig. 1 and fig. 2) as well as debris lying around all over the property's surface that he considers belong to colonial times. These pieces of ceramics and glass are some sort of riddle, there’s some possibility they belonged to a colonial settlement when gold was extracted but why would they still be on the surface after such long time? what is it about their physical properties that could confirm if they are, in fact, colonial? Is the shared verbally transferred knowledge enough to confirm that all of this belongs to colonial times and is related to goldmining activity. Or was it maybe there for some other reason?
The current inhabitants are a family that have inherited their land, not from goldminers, but most likely from ancestors who found this land abandoned once the mining was over.
Lately, I have had the possibility of going in a recurrent way and entered with a local into one of those private properties. He showed us old structures that were used to clean and to grind the extracted gold (fig. 1 and fig. 2) as well as debris lying around all over the property's surface that he considers belong to colonial times. These pieces of ceramics and glass are some sort of riddle, there’s some possibility they belonged to a colonial settlement when gold was extracted but why would they still be on the surface after such long time? what is it about their physical properties that could confirm if they are, in fact, colonial? Is the shared verbally transferred knowledge enough to confirm that all of this belongs to colonial times and is related to goldmining activity. Or was it maybe there for some other reason?
The current inhabitants are a family that have inherited their land, not from goldminers, but most likely from ancestors who found this land abandoned once the mining was over.