Lavrion

Lavrion lies at the southern tip of Attica, south-east of Athens. Its silver-bearing lead ores were mined in antiquity and financed classical Athens; in the 19th century companies reopened the mines and reworked the ancient slags. The oxidized ores and the slags, altered by seawater, have produced hundreds of mineral species, many of them rare. Lavrion is the type locality of laurionite and of serpierite, named after the mining entrepreneur Giovanni Battista Serpieri, and is known for smithsonite, adamite and annabergite.