page_title: Turracher Höhe Pass
section_title: Mining
hierarchical_section_title: Turracher Höhe Pass / History / Mining
context_page_description: Turracher Höhe, also called Turracherhöhe, refers to a village, a pass across the Alps, and a countryside in the Gurktal Alps in Austria. The village and the Turracher Lake at the pass, which both share the same name, are separated by the border of the two federal states of Styria and Carinthia. Because of its distance to early settlement areas and its high location, the region was not settled until relatively late. In the 17th century, mining was started below the Turracherhöhe. The opening up of the top of the pass by a paved road did not occur until later. During the 20th century, the region was gradually developed for tourism. Efforts are being made to maintain the
  diversity of flora and fauna of the Turracherhöhe by means of landscape conservation areas and careful and nature-oriented extension of the tourist facilities.
context_section_description: With a certificate issued in Moosheim dating from the year 1256, the Carinthian duke Ulrich III gave the minstrel and poet, Ulrich von Liechtenstein, the sovereign right for mining in the district of Murau, which contains the region around Turracher Höhe. However, concrete indications of mining in the Turrach region cannot be found either in this document or in the following centuries.
  In 1657, Johann Adolf Count Schwarzenberg, who ruled Murau, initiated the search for copper ore. In the Steinbachgraben, huge amounts of limonite (a type of iron ore) were found, whereupon the count asked Emperor Leopold I for a license for mining and smelting, which was issued on January 31, 1660. Already in the same year, Johann Adolf ordered the building of a bloomery for smelting iron in Turrach, and in 1662, the first tapping was performed. Initially the mining and smelting took place mainly on the Styrian side around the village at the northern foothill. In 1783, Count Johann Nepomuk Anton of Schwarzenberg ordered the extension of the road, which was 15 km long, from Predlitz to his factory in Turrach, in order to facilitate the ore transport. But there were routes for transporting wood and charcoal above the village, too, which reached today's pass summit.
  The general economic crisis resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and their consequences also reached Turrach's mining in the first two decades of the 19th century. Following that, the iron business—under Peter Tunner senior (the father of Peter Tunner), who led the company from 1823 to 1844—underwent a considerable advancement, due to the streamlining of working methods and the introduction of modern technologies. In the middle of the 19th century, the annual quantity of ore delivered by the approximately 60 miners amounted to about 100 to 120,000 quintals (approx. 5,600 to 6,700 t). At that time, mining was only done during the winter, because the ore had to be pulled to the smelting facilities in bags.
  As of 1863, a rocking Bessemer converter, which made the steel production more efficient, was used in Turrach. In 1865, three converters with a capacity of 35 to 40 quintals and two blast furnaces were available. At that time, the iron smelting facility was Styria's largest and was considered to be one of the most modern in Europe. In spite of the technical innovations, there was soon an economic decline. As of the 1870s, the sales worsened; the production of raw iron decreased from 3,800 to 1,500 t between 1869 and 1885. Besides increasing coal prices, Turrach's disadvantageous location off the major transport routes caused high transportation costs, which were responsible for the decreasing competitiveness of the iron companies. In 1899, the iron smelting facility was leased out, which brought no improvement, so the furnace in Turrach was finally shut down in the spring of 1909.
  Besides iron mining, copper mining occasionally played a role. Other natural resources are small amounts of high-grade anthracite coal, which was mined until the 1950s and 1960s. The mining of cinnabar at the Kornock can already be proven in the 17th century. A former stone pit at Lake Turrach, as well as a magnesium carbonate and a slate pit, are evidence of the mining activities around Turracher Höhe, which however were entirely given up in the course of the 20th century for economic reasons.
caption: Map of the iron mine from 1707
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