... and some mineral-encrusted buildings

People have used blocks of broken, cut or polished stone for building and decoration since the dawn of human time. However, it's less common to use individual crystals in buildings.

Thw "Morrua Hilton" is a very fancy 1960s (?) house at the Morrua lithium-tantalum pegmatite in Mozambique. It was built by the brutal Portugese colonial administration in something of a James Bond villain style, with a huge swimming pool, folly castles, and modernist main building. Mineralogically the main building is remarkable, in being clad in large plates of lilac "lepidolite" lithium mica:

Large plates of lepidolite in the walls of the Morrua Hilton

The mine was the scene of fighting in the civil war which was fomented by South Africa and Rhodesia following Mozambique's independence in 1975, but the building has survived. When I visited, the mine was under redevelopment by Noventa. It was also the home of a large garimpeiro community of artisanal tanatalum miners, who extracted tantalum minerals from mine waste, and the local river with extraordinary skill. Noventa has good relations with this community, and is happy to work alongside them.


Another odd mineral-encrusted building can be seen at the Sorbas gypsum caves, in Andalusia, SE Spain. Here, modern buildings beside the visitor centre are harled with glittering blocks of coarse selenite gypsum:

Coarse selenite gypsum bocks coating walls at the Sorbas caves visitor centre

The gypsum deposits of the Sorbas Basin were formed by evaporation of a repeatedly-replenished marginal basin during refilling of the Mediterranean following the great Messinian event when the whole sea dried up. Unlike the fine-grained sabkha gypsum typical of the Permian in the UK, the Sorbas gypsum formed as a mush of large clear selenite crystals on the seafloor - very spectacular rocks.

Lepidolite and gypsum - any offers of other minerals which have been used to coat buildings?