At the end of the last year, the SGA Student Chapter Prague organised another autumn excursion, this time to the Bohemian Paradise and Podkrkonoší regions. The excursion, led by Jan Bubal, took place from November 14 to 16, 2025, and one of its main purposes was to welcome the first-year geology student members of the Prague Chapter.
The first stop was the cooperative of artistic production Granát Turnov, which has been producing original jewellery with Bohemian garnets since 1953. They not only process garnets, but also mine them in shallow open-pit mines in the České středohoří and Podkrkonoší regions.
Our second stop was a quarry well known for its decorative granite – the Liberec granite. The feldspars vary in colour from pink to green or blue due to changes in their chemical composition. This granite is one of the most iconic and most widely used decorative stones in the Czech Republic.
We ended the first day with a visit to the Bohemian Paradise Museum. We had the opportunity to walk through an exhibition dedicated to the geology and mineral recourses of the region, an exhibition presenting the systematic mineralogical classification, and a particularly interesting exhibition focused on UV-luminescent materials. In addition to minerals, the collection included synthetic crystals (e.g. REE:YAG) and uranium glass, both produced exclusively in the Czech Republic.
During the field trip, we also visited several smaller quarries and old waste dumps – the last remnants of historical ore mining in the region. The mineral recourses we focused on included: chrysocolla, manganese oxide dendrites, olivine rich basalts, melaphyres with various SiO2 infills and UV-active calcite, acicular pectolite in dolerite, Fe ores in gossans, and, last but not least, hydrothermal veins containing fluorite and baryte.
The excursion appealed not only to students interested in economic geology or mineralogy, but also to those focusing on palaeontology. One of our stops was near the town of Jičín, where, in addition to carnelian, mechanoglyphs of waves and raindrops can be observed in Permo-Carboniferous sediments.
This field trip sparked interest among our young student members, further motivating them toward the field of economic geology.
