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northern French coal mining region
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How it came to be
The Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield stretches about 120 km along a coal seam that continues into Belgium. Mining took off in the 18th century, and from the 1850s, under the Second Empire, the basin became the most important in France. By 1930 it employed about 75,000 workers and produced 60 per cent of the country's coal.
On the morning of 10 March 1906 a coal-dust explosion at the Courrières mine near Lens killed 1,099 miners, the worst mining disaster in Europe. Twenty days later 13 survivors were brought out alive. Strikes spread across the coalfield after the disaster, eventually involving 46,000 men.
After the Second World War output fell as seams ran out and oil grew cheap, and almost every pit had closed by the late 1980s. Pits, headframes, slag heaps, miners' housing, schools and churches, 109 components in all, were inscribed in 2012.
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