The St Bathans Blue Lake is an old mining pit. By the 1930s, miners had created the deepest mining pit in the southern hemisphere \u2013 but it had started to encroach on the town. So, it was abandoned and allowed to slowly fill with water, where the remaining minerals in the soil gave the lake a distinctive emerald colour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
800 metres long and 50 metres<\/strong> deep, the Blue Lake is the result of water filling the excavations carried out by the Kildare mine over 70 years. A 120-metre hill became a 58-metre deep pit, where a massive 68.8-metre hydraulic mining lift operated until the mine was abandoned in 1934.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The St Bathans Blue Lake is an old mining pit. By the 1930s, miners had created the deepest mining pit in the southern hemisphere \u2013 but it had started to encroach on the town. So, it was abandoned and allowed to slowly fill with water, where the remaining minerals in the soil gave the lake a distinctive emerald colour. 800 metres long and 50 metres deep, the Blue Lake is the result of water filling the excavations carried out by the Kildare mine over 70 years. A 120-metre hill became a 58-metre…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14701,"template":"","meta":[],"class_list":["post-14548","phort_post","type-phort_post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","phort_post_category-blue-lake-st-bathans","phort_post_category-central-otago","phort_post_category-mountains-and-lakes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydnature.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/phort_post\/14548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydnature.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/phort_post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydnature.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/phort_post"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydnature.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydnature.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}