- After years of avatars, the City of Sangüesa has authorised the Australian company Geoalcali to start the work of the controversial mine. The potash and the common salt were extracted from this mine.
The mining project affects the subsoil of the municipality of Xabier de Navarra and the Undués de Lerdakoa de Aragón. Geoalcali, for its part, intends to carry out a processing plant for materials extracted from the mine in the lands of Sangüesa. With this authorization, the multinational will be able to initiate the entry of the mine, which it hopes will be able to start work in the second half of this year.
The company estimates that it has already invested EUR 90 million and expects the project to reach EUR 600 million. It ensures that it will generate 2,000 jobs for the mine to open and that the mine will then employ 800 people. Even so, Geoalcali would be awaiting an authorisation for compatibility by the Government of Navarra for logging.
Opposite attitude
The size of the project is no smaller: the mining galleries can be extended in a space of 8.5 kilometers in length and 3.5 kilometers in width, reaching a depth of 600 meters. It can extract 6.3 million tons of materials in the next 25 years. It is estimated that all these land should be moved with a thousand trucks a day.
In addition, the project’s opponents denounce that it would lead to great pollution, including in rivers and aquifers. Large quantities of water would also be required for the operation and Geoalcali expects that it would be obtained from the Yesa reservoir. Several environmental associations and groups submitted claims to the project last December.