Finstone’s Nero Impala® quarries are established in the oldest area of dimension stone mining
activity in a 20km long outcrop running from north of Marikana to north of Rustenburg. These
quarries produce the highly sought after Nero Impala® material on which the reputation in the
international market has been built since the early 1960s, and which has led to Nero Impala®’s
position as the largest volume source of granite in the world.
The newer operations producing Nero Africa material are situated further east towards Brits.
While Nero Africa is similar in appearance to Nero Impala® and has the polishing and other
physical characteristics of the traditional material, the quality differs from the classical
Nero Impala®.
Finstone's Nero Impala® and Nero Africa quarrying operations spread West to East
over an area of 60 km2 providing an important volume component of about
90 000 m3 of the 150 000 m3 or over 600 000 tons of Nero Impala® and Nero Africa
granite traded annually.
Initially, there was very little mechanisation and tower cranes were used to extract the blocks from
the loose surface boulders. As the accessible surface boulders were quarried out and demand
increased, expanding mortar, mechanisation and specialised diamond wire sawing
technology was introduced to access the underlying 'solid' formations.