Escletxes de Papiol

A set of fissures that fracture the tabular hill of les Escletxes. Many of them are open-air fractures that cross the limestone mass of the hill in a N-S direction and in different sections join one another thanks to other minor fractures of orthogonal orientation. There are also different fully subterranean sections. The width of the fissures is highly variable, the widest being the one located furthest west in the set (A-C on the survey), currently known as La Rambla.

In the easternmost area of the hill there were other fissures that disappeared due to the working of a quarry during the decade of the 1950s (on the GES survey this area is drawn in dotted lines).

The hill of les Escletxes is formed by reef limestone with numerous fossils of ostreids, gastropods, sea urchins, etc., which indicate that its deposition took place under tropical climatic conditions. The whole set rests on continental clayey materials also of Miocene age.

les Escletxes are the result of the sliding of the fractured limestone blocks over the more plastic materials of their basement.

Oscar Andrés, author of the first survey, calculates that the total length would be 640 metres, counting the fissures that disappeared due to the quarry. From the existing survey data we have made an estimated calculation of some 300 metres.