The image of abandoned quarries appears very often both in the tissue of our city and the natural environment. The unregulated exploitation of quarries which prevailed in the past and the lack of rehabilitation program has created a plethora of dead quarry sites and had negative effects on the environment.  However, during the last thirty years, there is a growing sensitivity towards the issue of restoration of old quarries and rational planning of modern mining activity. After a period of relative obsolescence and neglect, our culture seems to be redefining the value of the natural environment and to treat nature as a place to live and not only to exploit.

Quarries are both landscape and cultural elements. They are an expression of a wider system, not only stunning visuals but fields of intense experiences and stimuli. Therefore, we should not perceive them as a problem that needs to be eliminated but as pieces of the urban fabric or natural landscape that must be restored and attributed to man and nature.

Nowadays, the technical culture, history and archaeology of the industrial history, have taken their place in the firmament of our knowledge about the past. The remnants of this industrial activity can now and must be recognized as monuments of cultural heritage, which make up a peculiar, discredited and in danger, piece of our technical culture.

In this paper we will try to interpret the quarry extraction space, as a new landscape witch is involved in the natural environment, has clear boundaries and characteristics. We face it as a potential free space given to man and not as a marginal and isolated one. In addition, with the help of the Web-based platform «Google earth», we investigate the scale of quarrying activity in Greece. Finally, we study on the methods of rehabilitation and restoration of abandoned quarries, and cite examples of such sites worldwide.