This must be Belgium’s best kept secret, literally hidden 10 meters below the surface.

The sun is baking and I am trying to find my way around some large fields in the outskirts of Mons, a Belgian city not exactly well known for its tourist attractions. 

Desperately trying to find something exiting to do I stumbled upon a website during research that mentioned that this area contains hundreds of mines, up to 15 meters deep and made around 6400 years ago. This is what’s sent me on a bicycle trip to an otherwise very quiet and dull area. 

If it wasn’t for Google I surely would never believed to have been in the right place, but surprisingly, among fields and narrow roads a strange round building rises. The parking lot is empty and it seems to be little activity here.

The building houses a small museum, but it is also an active archeological excavation site. On Saturdays and Sundays during the summer they are off duty and the museum allows 12 people per day to enter the mines themselves. 

The mines were created around 6400 years ago to extract flint to create tools. Surprisingly, the mines are not small hillsides with an indent, but proper 10-15 meter shafts going straight down into the ground, very impressive given that it was made this long ago. The mining area here covers approximately 1 square kilometer, but only a few mines and shafts have been excavated so far.  The excavations have been on-going for the last 150 years, so progress isn’t exactly fast. 

The mines haven’t been “tourisified”, so there are no convenient ways of getting down here. I am provided a hard hat and climbing harness, attached to a safety line above a really long ladder plunging into darkness 10 meters below. At the surface the temperature far exceeds 20 degrees today, down in the mines it is a steady 12 degrees all the time. Getting down there takes some time, but as we are only three visitors it is manageable. 

The shaft is so narrow that I frequently hit the walls with my back. It can’t have been easy getting up and down from here 6400 years ago… The difference in temperature is felt quickly and my hands are getting moist from the cold air. 

Down in the mines I am greeted by an impressive view. Many areas are spacious and allow me to stand upright, others are narrow and small. The bright walls of the mines shine in stark contrast to the dark flint stones. Some places the flint has been completely removed, elsewhere plenty is left behind. Lights have been deployed down here, making the different structures even more prominent. The first miners 6400 years ago surely did not have this level of convenience. 

Small notes with numbers on them are scattered around the walls, serving a a reminder that this is primarily an active archeological site (well, also serving the purpose of whatever archeologists use them for…). 

Unfortunately I am not allowed to take any photos down here, for reasons the museum staff didn’t really seem to be able to answer. Luckily there are official photos, so take a look here and here. 

Exactly why this places is so «secret» and lacks tourists I never managed to figure out. If you scroll down far enough on TripAdvisor the attraction is actually listed and visitMons does have brochures about the site. Still it seems like a place no-one talks about and the fact that no photography is allowed makes it even harder to show the world what an awesome place this is. They might want to limit the number of tourists coming here, but with only 3 people showing up on one of the busiest days of the year that hardly seems like an issue. 

I will therefore make a very bold statement and proclaim that this is Belgium’s best kept secret. In a time where tourists are flooding almost every location on earth and attractions are modified to be as convenient and efficient as possible this is one of the most authentic experiences out there that you can see without being an archeologist yourself.