Mibladen & Midelt

The lead here was the business and the vanadinite was the by-product, and now it is the other way round. Mibladen is a commune in Midelt Province in eastern Morocco, a settlement of about three thousand people, and the workings around it were run for galena. The United States Geological Survey lists the Aouli-Mibladen site as a past producer of lead with silver alongside it, and records an ore body sixteen kilometres long and twenty-five metres thick carrying galena, cerussite, barite and quartz.

Vanadinite is what everyone knows it for. The crystals are hexagonal prisms in red through orange to red-brown, and the best of them come out studded across a matrix, not loose. The Mineralogical Record described a lot from a prospect near the old ACF mine workings that yielded around seventy specimens, from thumbnails up to large cabinet pieces with crystals to two centimetres covering them. Some of that material was colour-zoned red and orange in a sandwich, orange through the middle, and some crystals were compound and stepped so that parallel groups read like meshing gears.

That is the character of the district: it produces so consistently that the trade has learned to expect drama from it, and every few years a new pocket resets what people thought the ceiling was.

Two practical notes. The USGS materials list for the site records barite, cerussite, galena and quartz alongside the lead, so there is more here than the one famous species. And this is old industrial ground, not a managed site, so anything you do here runs through the people working it now rather than through a visitor centre.