During decades there were three independent plants and later they complemented each other: Panasqueira, Cabeço do Pião and Barroca Grande. Panasqueira Plant began to be built in the 19th century and was progressively transferred, from 1928, to Barroca Grande which has a more central location, more available area, greater access to water and other advantages that led to the Panasqueira Plant being totally deactivated in the 1960s. The Cabeço do Pião plant such as Panasqueira began to be built at the end of the 19th century. With the abandonment of this vein exploitation zone, and due to the greater availability of water of the Zêzere River, this plant only treated the pre-concentrates that came, first by aerial cable and later by truck from the Barroca Grande Plant. At the end of the 80s, the Panasqueira mine had enough extension so that its drainage water was sufficient to supply the necessary flow to the entire industrial structure; so between 1992 and 1996 in order to rationalize costs and due to environmental reasons the centralization of all ore concentration operations was done in Barroca Grande.