Not far from the centre of Cognola there is a small public park entirely built inside an old quarry. From here come the stones with which some of the sixteenth-century villas on the hill of Trento were built, such as the Villa Consolati of Fontanasanta.

The porphyry that we find in the territory of the Ecomuseum was formed about 280 million years ago in the Permian, a period of great upheavals of the earth's crust. As a result of continuous explosive volcanic eruptions, huge quantities of lava, ash and lapilli were produced, which cooled and gave rise to the thick deposits of Porphyry that now characterise the Val di Cembra.