BlokPort (@blokport)

Northern China, deep in Shanxi Province, a region far better known to the world for its coal. But buried beneath all that coal lies a much older, and far darker, kind of rock entirely. #ShanxiBlack #ChineseStone #BlokPort

Florence, around fourteen twenty, and the architect Brunelleschi has a problem to solve. He needs a stone strong enough to truly build with, yet calm and elegant enough to look at. #PietraSerena #RenaissanceStone #BlokPort

Just ten years ago, almost nobody in the entire West had ever even heard of this marble. Cheaper than Carrara, cleaner than most Chinese white, and in bigger blocks than either one. #VietnameseMarble #AsianStone #BlokPort

Walk down almost any older street in Leeds, Manchester or Sheffield, and just look down. That's Yorkstone, a hard Carboniferous sandstone, roughly three hundred million years old. #Yorkstone #NorthernEngland #BlokPort

This pale, fossil rich limestone comes from Bavaria, in the gentle hill country of south Germany. It was laid down about a hundred and fifty million years ago, slowly, one tiny grain at a time. #JuraLimestone #BavarianStone #BlokPort

The Italian word for a blackboard is lavagna, and that, it turns out, is no coincidence at all. But the blackboards were never the real money. The real money is somewhere else entirely. #LigurianSlate #ItalianStone #BlokPort

Despite the name, Belgian bluestone, or petit granit, isn't actually any kind of granite at all. It's really a Carboniferous limestone, laid down about three hundred and forty five million years ago. #BelgianBluestone #BelgianStone #BlokPort

Look really closely at a polished slab and something genuinely strange begins to happen. And this exact rock exists in real, workable quantities in just one place on the entire planet. #Larvikite #BlueGranite #BlokPort

In the Sierra de los Filabres, near Almería in southern Spain, marble has been cut for ages. The Romans quarried here first, two thousand years before anyone called it an industry. #MacaelMarble #SpanishStone #BlokPort

They call this one the stone of empire, and for once the grand old nickname is fully earned. Those grand colonial churches and palaces across Brazil? Much of that pale stone is Lioz. #LiozLimestone #StoneHistory #BlokPort

Three small towns out on the flat Alentejo plain quietly run a whole national marble industry. The long façade of the ducal palace at Vila Viçosa is faced entirely in this local marble. #EstremozMarble #PortugueseStone #BlokPort

Southwest Turkey, a landscape of dark pine forest running right down to the Aegean coast. And underneath all of it lies one of the largest white marble basins anywhere in the world. #MuglaMarble #TurkishStone #BlokPort

Turkey is now the single biggest marble exporter on earth, ahead of even Italy by volume. And a remarkable amount of all of it comes out of just one province, in the country's centre. #TurkishMarble #AfyonMarble #BlokPort

Iran sits on top of some of the very largest travertine reserves found anywhere on the planet. And Mahallat is its capital, a whole town organised entirely around cutting and shipping it. #IranianTravertine #TravertineFacts #BlokPort

The showroom is really just a warehouse: cold concrete floor, high ceilings, hard flat light. Around five hundred slabs stand racked on A frames, each waiting for someone to fall for it. #StoneShowroom #StoneFacts #BlokPort

Loading a container is its own quiet craft. Inside go a carefully chosen handful of A frames. The whole load is kept down to around twenty three tonnes, never a single kilo more than that. #StoneExport #StonePacking #BlokPort

In the next room, five axis cutting heads move through stone in directions hands never could. Every single move is programmed in advance by a draftsman sitting at a screen somewhere nearby. #CNCStone #StoneProcessing #BlokPort

A heavy slab sits on a table sliding slowly back and forth, over and over, beneath one blade. Above it hangs a single spinning diamond blade, dropping a few millimetres more on every pass. #BridgeSaw #StoneCutting #BlokPort

Hold a slab of onyx up against a lamp, and you'll watch the light pass straight through it. Almost no other building stone on earth does that. It's exactly why onyx is so prized. #NaturalOnyx #OnyxFacts #BlokPort

This is the very stone the Colosseum itself is built from, quarried in the hills outside Rome. And those very same quarries are still fully working today, cutting from the same Roman layers. #RomanTravertine #TravertineFacts #BlokPort

Most of the world's slate roofs come from one cold, wet, deeply green corner of Spain. Galicia, up in the far northwest, where the heavy rain almost never seems to fully stop. #GaliciaSlate #SpanishSlate #BlokPort

Rajasthan has a pink city, a blue city and a golden city, each one named for its own stone. Across the whole region, the towns are quite literally built out of the ground they stand on. #RajasthanSandstone #IndianStone #BlokPort

Three southern Indian states do most of the work: Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Some of the deepest, most perfectly uniform black stone on earth comes straight out of here. #IndianGranite #SouthIndiaStone #BlokPort

A busy working port, built almost entirely around one enormous, slowly growing hill of stone. Vitoria, on the coast of Espirito Santo, the export gateway to the world for the whole region. #VitoriaPort #StoneShipping #BlokPort

Quartzite is harder than granite. It's hard enough to wreck the very tools sent in to cut it. #Quartzite #QuartziteFacts #BlokPort

Here's the part the showroom never tells you. Some of these slabs come out completely perfect. But most of them don't. Natural stone is rarely anywhere near as flawless as it finally looks. #StoneResin #StoneTreatment #BlokPort

Once the cutting is done, the shine begins. Eighteen heavy polishing heads sit in one long row. A completely dull, flat, lifeless grey slab goes quietly in at one end of this long line. #GranitePolishing #StoneFinish #BlokPort

It begins simply enough, with one enormous raw granite block rolled slowly into the machine. Each wire is studded with sintered diamond beads, the only thing on earth hard enough to cut it. #BrazilianGranite #MultiWire #BlokPort

Almost all of this begins in one single Brazilian state most people have never even heard of. Espirito Santo, the source of the overwhelming majority of all of Brazil's stone exports. #BrazilianGranite #GraniteOrigin #BlokPort

Stone like this never travels by air. It is simply far too heavy to ever get off the ground. Wooden A frames, heavy steel strapping, and that fine white marble dust over almost everything. #CarraraMarble #MarbleShipping #BlokPort