Mining of iron ore and production of iron in Ljubija has been going on since the very beginning of the Iron Age, which is a period of over two thousand five hundred years, at least five centuries BC. The Phoenicians, searching for gold and silver, and then for iron, went along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to all areas rich in ores, and that’s how they arrived in our region. They built mines and smelters whose technology was primitive, but appropriate for the time.

Industrial production in the Ljubija metallogenetic area began in 1916, and significant progress in the production of iron ore was achieved in the middle of the 20th century with the introduction of mass excavation and the construction of plants for the preparation of iron ore. Massification of mining production enabled the construction of the Central Mines, the East Mines and the Omarska Mine, which operated within the framework of the RŽR Ljubija as three independent technical-technological units where the surface excavation and preparation of iron ore took place.