Ytterby mine
— — the small hole that named four elements.
Not only on a wall.
“A closed feldspar quarry on Resarö island in the inner Stockholm archipelago. In 1787 a young lieutenant named Carl Axel Arrhenius pulled a black mineral from the rock here. Chemists spent the next century unwinding it. Four elements bear the village's name: yttrium, terbium, erbium, ytterbium. Three more were first identified here. The shaft sits quiet now, fenced and marked with a plaque, in a wood above the water.
Ytterby mine, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ytterby is a village on the southern shore of Resarö, an island in Vaxholm municipality about 25 kilometres north-east of central Stockholm. The mine sits just inland from the water on the south side of the island. Quartz and feldspar were quarried here from the late 18th century to supply Swedish porcelain works at Rörstrand and later Marieberg. The pit closed in 1933. Today the site is a small wooded clearing reached by a marked footpath, with a plaque from the European Physical Society naming it a Historic Site of Chemistry.
The mineral that started everything was named gadolinite — a dense, almost coal-black silicate carrying rare-earth elements no one had yet known to look for. Carl Axel Arrhenius found a sample in 1787; Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin isolated a new oxide from it in 1794 and called it yttria. Repeated separation over the next hundred years turned that single oxide into seven new elements: yttrium, terbium, erbium, ytterbium, holmium, thulium, and gadolinium. Scandium was also first detected in Ytterby ore. No single quarry in chemistry has yielded as many entries on the periodic table.
The mine sits at the end of Ytterbyvägen on Resarö, signed from the road. Getting there from central Stockholm takes about 45 minutes by car or roughly an hour by SL bus 670 to Vaxholm and a local connection across the bridge to Resarö. The shaft itself is sealed and fenced for safety; visitors stand at the rim and read the plaque. A short loop trail through the woods drops back to the water. Spring through autumn is the workable window. There is no admission, no kiosk, and no place to eat closer than Vaxholm.