Traditional crafts of the Monviso Park: iron mining and mountain craftsmanship

In the Occitan valleys that open at the foot of Monviso, the history of mountain labour is measured in tunnels carved into rock and in workshops where fire kept the cold at bay for months on end. In Bellino, a municipality in the Valle Varaita in the province of Cuneo, the subsoil still bears the marks of a mining activity documented since at least the 16th century: iron mines arranged in twelve galleries, shored up with timber frames, from which a fine-grade ore was extracted, suited to steel production. This was no marginal or occasional activity, but part of a productive system that involved the whole territory, extending as far as Pontechianale and to Torrette, a hamlet of Casteldelfino, where similar traces attest to the widespread reach of this mining economy along the valleys.

The context in which these crafts developed is that of the Escartons, the federation of Alpine communities that for centuries governed the Piedmontese and French slopes of Monviso according to their own statutes and a shared logic of self-sufficiency. An Occitan saying handed down in these valleys sums up the starting conditions with precision: *Nòu méi d'iver, tréi méi d'ënfer* — nine months of winter and three months of hell. In an environment that gave little and demanded much, the diversification of labour was not a choice but a structural necessity. Alongside high-altitude herding and farming, complementary activities multiplied: ironworking and woodworking, itinerant trades, skills passed down through generations as a family inheritance even before becoming a profession.

The mountain metallurgy of these valleys fits into a broader picture documented by historical research on medieval and early modern Piedmont: the movement of skilled workers, the transmission of technologies between different communities, figures of mining entrepreneurs who coordinated extraction and the first stages of metalworking. Bellino's iron, prized for its quality, did not necessarily stay put — it circulated, fed trade, connected the mountains to the valley markets and beyond. This mobility of goods and knowledge is one of the least visible yet most significant features of the traditional Alpine economy.

Today the Monviso Park, established as a cross-border protected area and recognised as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2013, includes the memory of these crafts among the constitutive elements of the territory's cultural identity. This is not folklore, but a way of reading the landscape that gives meaning back to abandoned tunnels, to place names tied to iron, to the stone structures that dot the slopes. The cross-border dimension — shared with the Parc naturel régional du Queyras on the French side — reinforces the idea that this civilisation of mountain labour knew no administrative borders, but followed the logic of resources, seasons and trade routes instead.