Ah mercury! the queen of metals.
Cinnabar is the main ore, although native mercury is found -indeed
it is a health hazard as it forms droplets leaking onto the heads of
miners.
Much mercury is incorporated into complex sulphides like the
tetrahedrite-tennantite group where it causes problems in present
day smelting of copper/silver unless distilled off.
a couple of trivia about mercury the Club of Rome 'Limits to Growth'
calculated that all mercury in the world would have been consumed
sometime early in the 90s of the last century-not so.
but better
mercury was so 'important/famous' in medieval times that the main
(Spanish) source needed no name but was called (and still is)
Almeden a corruption of the Arabic for 'the minerals'.
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