Historical mining tour
Our most popular guided tour, Historical Mining in the Cobalt Mines, is packed with history and excitement and is best suited for children and adults from 10 years and up. Highlights on the tour include walking over a “floating” glass floor and 32-meter-long underground suspension bridge—the first in Norway!
Facts
| Where | Koboltgruvene, Malmveien 620, 3370 Vikersund |
| Suitable for | From 10 years |
| Age Limit | 6 år |
| Duration | 1.5 hours |
| Adapted for | Wheelchair |
The tour begins at the Mining Yard, right in the middle of the mining landscape. Here you meet your guide and, at the mine entrance, receive your obligatory miner’s helmet and fleece cape. Inside the mountain, it is approximately 4 degrees centigrade.
Once in the mine «Clara Stoll» you pass through a 200-meter-long transport tunnel into the ore lake in the mountain. Along the way, you learn about the techniques used to create the many mining tunnels and extract the cobalt-rich ore, and the chemical process that turned ore to cobalt-blue pigment.
You will pass shafts that give a sense of the enormous dimensions of the Cobalt Mines. In Shaft 10 South, for example, it is almost 25 meters up to the ceiling, while in the Kormannsjakt, or Korman Shaft, the bottom is 40 meters below you.
Glass floor
400 meters inside and 50 meters underground in the Cobalt Mines is one of our newest attractions - ready to be stepped on. The underground glass floor in the Edvard Shaft is the first of its kind in the Nordic region. When this shaft was first cleared, we came across an original timber walkway left from mining in the 19th century, 20 meters down. At first, the question was, how to show this historic relic? But then our museum director, Tone S. Steinsvik, got the idea of putting in a glass floor. After consultations with numerous experts, her idea became reality - and now you can walk right out and over it!
For many visitors, even the most intrepid, it comes as a shock to see the old timber walkway floating 20 meters below them, but there’s no reason to feel unsafe: The construction was carefully tested and built to withstand eight tons. The Glass Floor is an exciting and spectacular element of this popular mining trip.
Suspension bridge
As if an underground glass floor is exciting enough, we also have a 32 metres long suspension bridge inside the mines. The bridge let us walk in the middle of the cobalt ore, in the Glück Auf stope.
Together we promise you this is an unforgettable experience.
The entire tour is on footpaths and can be experienced with a wheelchair. Og vil du bli med på tur, men ønsker ikke å trå ut på verken glassgulvet eller hengebro, er det null problem problem. Denne gruveturen har 6 års aldersgrense.
Season opening in 2024 is 11 May. Historical Tour schedule coming soon!
