Skip-the-line available The History of Líthica — The Quarries That Built Menorca
Two centuries of marès quarrying, a rescue from the landfill, and the foundation that turned the hand-cut and machine-cut canyons into a garden.
Almost everything you see in Menorca — the honey-coloured walls of Ciutadella, its cathedral, the farmhouses and dry-stone field walls — was cut out of the ground at places like Pedreres de s'Hostal. For generations, quarrymen sliced the island's soft golden sandstone, marès, from this seam just outside Ciutadella, working downwards block by block until they had carved a five-hectare landscape of canyons and chambers: architecture in reverse. When the saws fell silent in the spring of 1994 the exhausted pits were bound for the landfill. Instead they were rescued, and over thirty years remade into one of Menorca's strangest cultural landscapes — a quarry turned garden, theatre and protected heritage site. This is how that happened.
Marès: The Stone That Built an Island
Marès — marés in Castilian — is a soft, porous, honey-gold calcarenite sandstone, and it is the stone Menorca is made of. Easy to saw into regular ashlar blocks when freshly cut, then hardening as it weathers, it was the natural building material of an island with little timber and no other workable stone. For centuries the marès quarried at Pedreres de s'Hostal, a kilometre from Ciutadella, went into the town's houses, churches, palaces and its cathedral, and into the countless dry-stone walls and farmhouses that pattern the Menorcan landscape. To understand the island's architecture is to understand marès: the same warm stone repeated from the grandest façade to the humblest field wall, all of it cut from seams like this one.
Quarrying marès is unusual work because it is done downwards. Rather than building up or tunnelling in, the quarrymen cut the stone away from the surface in level courses, lifting out block after block and sinking ever deeper into the ground. Over the working life of a quarry this leaves not a hole but a sculpted negative space — vertical-walled canyons, chambers and corridors open to the sky, their faces marked by the tools that made them. At s'Hostal this process, repeated over two centuries, hollowed out roughly five hectares of carved rock: a man-made landscape created entirely by the removal of material, the exact inverse of conventional architecture.
Two Quarries: Hand-Cut and Machine-Cut
Líthica is really two quarries side by side, worked in two different eras by two different methods, and the contrast between them is the key to reading the site. The older sector was cut by hand through the 19th and 20th centuries, quarrymen working the stone with picks and long saws. Hand-cutting follows the rock and the worker's reach, so its walls are soft, irregular and organic, stepping and curving in response to the seam. This is the older, more intimate part of the quarry — the section that has since been most fully planted as gardens — and its weathered, human-scaled chambers feel almost domestic compared with what lies next door.
From 1960 a newer zone was opened up by machine, and mechanised cutting changed everything it touched. Powered saws drive straight and deep, so the machine-cut quarry rises in sheer, clean, vertical walls of great height around a flat floor — a space that feels like the nave of a roofless cathedral carved from a single block of golden stone. Mechanical extraction here continued until the spring of 1994, when stone-cutting at s'Hostal ceased altogether. Seeing the two quarries together — the hand-worked and the machine-worked, the organic and the geometric — is a compressed lesson in how the same stone and the same trade produced utterly different landscapes barely a century apart.
Abandonment and the Threat of the Landfill
When the last marès was lifted out in 1994, the quarries faced the fate of many exhausted pits. A 1983 law required worked-out quarries to be rehabilitated, and the cheapest way to fill a deep hole is to tip waste into it: the abandoned chambers at s'Hostal began to collect rubbish of every kind, and the site started to degrade and contaminate. A landscape that had taken two centuries to carve was on course to become a refuse dump, its canyons buried and lost. For a place that had supplied the very stone of Ciutadella, it was an unceremonious end — and, but for the intervention that followed, it would almost certainly have vanished under landfill within a few years.
What saved s'Hostal was a change of eyes rather than a change of law. Where others saw a hole to be filled, a small group saw a sculpted landscape of rare aesthetic value — five hectares of carved rock, sheltered canyons with their own microclimate, and a direct link to the island's building history. The argument that took hold was that the quarry was not a problem to be disposed of but a heritage to be kept: a record of how Menorca was literally built, written into the negative space the quarrymen had left behind. Turning that idea into a rescue would take a foundation, decades of volunteer labour and official protection.
1994: Laetitia Sauleau and the Líthica Association
The rescue was led by the French sculptor and landscape artist Laetitia Sauleau Lara, who had a particular reason to care about marès. As a young artist she had spent time on Menorca learning from the island's stonemasons and craftspeople who had worked the stone for generations, and in 1991 she was engaged to carve new marès gargoyles for the Cathedral of Menorca. When quarrying stopped in 1994 she founded the non-profit Líthica association to save Pedreres de s'Hostal, and from 1995 the foundation took on the site to clean it up, clear the accumulated waste and begin a long-term plan of restoration. It was a deliberately patient, low-budget effort, powered largely by volunteers.
The association's mission was never simply to tidy a ruin. From the start the idea was to turn the quarry into a living cultural landscape — a place for environmental, artistic and educational activity rather than a fenced-off monument. That vision won official backing: the site was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural, a protected Spanish cultural-heritage site, in 1997, and decades later, in 2017, it was further recognised as a property of ethnological interest by the Consell Insular de Menorca and entered in the island's heritage catalogue. Protection gave the long, slow work of restoration a permanence the volunteers' labour alone could not.
Building the Gardens, the Orchard and the Maze
The most visible work of the foundation has been to plant the old hand-cut quarry. The conditions inside the carved canyons turned out to be ideal for cultivation: sunk below the surface and walled by stone, the chambers are sheltered like ravines, holding humidity and shade so that vegetation grows lush and leafy where blocks were once hauled out. Into this micro-landscape the foundation built a sequence of green rooms — a botanical and biodiversity circuit of Menorcan and Mediterranean plants, a medieval-style garden, and an orchard of fruit trees — linked by meandering paths that wind between the quarry walls. Walking among citrus and aromatic herbs with worked stone rising on every side is the heart of what makes Líthica unlike anywhere else on the island.
Threaded through these plantings are the labyrinths the site is known for — the Circle of Orchards and a plant maze — designed so that you wind down into the quarry rather than across a flat field, until the maze and the carved landscape become a single thing. The order of the site's making is itself the story: first the quarries were hollowed out as stone was taken away, then orchards were planted, then came the years of abandonment when the gardens grew wild, and finally the deliberate restoration that shaped what visitors walk through today. It is, in the foundation's own framing, a forgotten landscape turned into living heritage — a garden built inside a quarry rather than a museum about one.
The Amphitheatre and the Living Quarry
The vast machine-cut quarry gave the foundation something no garden could: a natural auditorium. Its sheer stone walls and flat floor return sound with remarkable clarity, and the foundation shaped an amphitheatre from the rock to take advantage of those acoustics. Through the summer the quarry becomes a stage. For years Pedreres de s'Hostal has hosted a season of music, dance, theatre and film among the canyons, drawing audiences into a space whose scale and silence make even an ordinary evening feel charged. The exact programme changes from year to year, but the principle is constant: the quarry that once supplied the island's stone now supplies its concerts.
This is what the founders meant by keeping the quarry alive rather than embalming it. A protected ruin can be a place you look at; a working cultural venue is a place you use, and use keeps a site mended and loved. Líthica's summer programme — and the steady stream of visitors to the gardens the rest of the year — is what funds and justifies the slow, continuing restoration. The result is a rare kind of heritage success: a five-hectare landscape that was nearly buried as rubbish in 1994 is now both a Bien de Interés Cultural and one of Menorca's most distinctive places to spend an evening or a quiet morning. The history of Líthica is, in the end, the history of how an island chose to keep the negative space its builders left behind.
Frequently asked
What is marès stone and why does it matter to Menorca?
Marès (marés) is a soft, honey-gold sandstone — the traditional building stone of Menorca. For centuries it was quarried at sites like Pedreres de s'Hostal and used for Ciutadella's houses, churches, cathedral, palaces and the island's dry-stone walls, so much of Menorca's architecture is literally made of stone cut here.
When did quarrying stop at Pedreres de s'Hostal?
Stone-cutting ceased in the spring of 1994. The older sector had been worked by hand through the 19th and 20th centuries, and a newer zone was extracted mechanically from 1960 until 1994, when quarrying at s'Hostal ended.
What is the difference between the hand-cut and machine-cut quarries?
The older quarry was cut by hand, leaving soft, irregular, organic walls — now the most planted part of the site. The newer quarry was opened by machine from 1960, leaving sheer, straight, towering vertical walls. Seeing the two together is the heart of a visit.
Who saved Líthica and when?
After quarrying stopped in 1994, the French sculptor Laetitia Sauleau Lara founded the non-profit Líthica association to rescue the site from becoming a landfill. The foundation took on the quarries from 1995 to clean and restore them and turn them into a cultural landscape.
Was Líthica nearly turned into a rubbish dump?
Yes. After quarrying ended the abandoned pits began filling with waste and degrading, on course to become a landfill. The Líthica association intervened to clear the rubbish and restore the site instead, preserving the carved canyons.
Is Líthica a protected heritage site?
Yes. Pedreres de s'Hostal was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural — a protected Spanish cultural-heritage site — in 1997, and in 2017 it was further recognised as a property of ethnological interest and entered in Menorca's heritage catalogue.
Why are there concerts in the quarry?
The sheer walls of the machine-cut quarry give it remarkable natural acoustics, so the foundation shaped a rock-cut amphitheatre there. Through the summer Líthica hosts a season of music, dance, theatre and film, using the quarry as a dramatic open-air stage.
How big is the Líthica quarry site?
The carved quarry landscape covers roughly five hectares, hollowed out of the rock over two centuries of marès extraction about a kilometre outside Ciutadella, in the west of Menorca.