The São Domingos Mine is a village created from 1854, when the deposit of metallic metal sulfides was rediscovered by a Piedmont Italian named Nicolau Biava, employed at the Alosno Mine (Huelva, Spain).
The ceding of the mining concession by leasing the Spanish (French) company La Sabina to the English company Mason & Barry marked the beginning of a period of great activity in the Serra de São Domingos and complete transformation of the landscape.
Housing was built to house the miners and their families and various social facilities (hospital, theater, pharmacy, recreation club, grocery store, Catholic church, Protestant cemetery for the British community installed, administration palace) and industrial: workshops, carpentry , laboratory, power plant, water extraction system at the bottom of the mine, roasting and smelting furnaces and, which were decisive for the success of the project, the railway between the São Domingos Mine and the Pomarão, the river port on the banks of the Guadiana river and the Chança river. In the early years of exploration Mason & Barry devoted all its efforts to underground mining, but by 1866, the fall in copper prices forced management to reconsider the strategy and the following year, open-pit exploration began.