A visit to the Salt Mine

A few days back I went with @munatic to a very famous salt mine near to Krakow in Poland. At first it sounded very boring but boy was I in for a surprise! It was actually really cool!

Wieliczka Salt Mine, Poland

Let me start by giving you some quite cool facts about the place. Firstly its far from a tiny mine, and who would have known that at one time in out history, Salt was actually considered as valuable as gold and people would even trade a Kg of gold happily for a Kg of salt. Back in the 'old days' when we had no other way to preserve fresh foods such as meat and fish, salt was found and used as a perfect conservative meaning that one could keep meats for a long period of time and this made it something just for the rich classes.

Strange to think this considering salt is very cheap these days and found in all parts of the world. Apparently even the English word 'Salary' comes from the word salt..

The mine is still an active mine but more so the workers are working there just to preserve it as it's very old and if it collapses then the town above ground would also collapse. Its more like a gold mine than it is a salt mine. It has over 1.1 million tourist's visit it each year and has even been rented out for great wedding's of the wealthy (because there is even a chapel in the mine) and it was once even the venue for a Techno party.

Not sounding like an average mine now is it?! It costs Half a million euro to privately rent out the mine for Half A Day which is plenty enough time to get married and have a few drinks afterwards - this is the amount of money they make from ticket sales alone in that time it would have been privately rented out. There is also a health center inside as the salt air has good healing property's.

The tour started of with us all walking down a shaft of stairs, which was 56 levels under the ground. It got quite dizzy walking down and around the stair case after a while. This picture below, is a view down in between the hand rails of the deep decline which took us to the mine. The mine has passageways of nearly 200 miles in total and its depth is around 320 meters below the earth surface. The route we would walk wasn't even 1% of the whole tunnel system down there.

That very tiny black rectangle in the picture below would be the start of the tourist route around the mine.

After a lot of steps down we reached the start of the tour. Literally everything in the mine is made from salt, only the wooden beams used for supporting the walls and parts of the ceiling are made from wood. There are wonderful statues that we skillfully carved by the miners themselves and its true that only one miner was actually an artist and the others just seemed to have a natural skill at sculpturing.
The walls, ceiling and floor, and even huge chandeliers are made from salt down there, which is kind of hard to grasp.

This is how they would excavate the salt, and to bring it up from the mine.

4 Men would walk around pushing this contraption 8 hours a day, pulling up 300kg of salt at a time. This job was highly 'salt' after as it was the safest job in the mine where the chances of injury were minimum.

The story of the mine is depicted in scenes of models and below is someone presenting a rock of salt to the King of Poland..

Here below is how it looked back in the days of the miners, it would have been very dark and horrible working conditions..

There are many different chambers where salt has been taken out to leave big openings in the mine, and all of them are very old.

They first used to pull the salt of wooden sledges but then later managed to move horses down into the mine for working.

Most if not all of the walls and wooden support beams were painted white, because of minimal light down there, the white paint would reflect any light to make it easier to see.

This is how they got the horses down to the mine, using a huge lifting system. The horse's were very well looked after and respected by everyone and they had their own stables. This experience was so stressful for the horses to be taken down there that the horses were never taking back up to the surface, and would have finished there days down in the mine.

The king who owned the mine was so rich that the salt produced each day was enough to buy around EIGHT Whole Villages, making this king by far the richest man around. And yes everything in the picture is made and sculptured in salt.

This was quite breathtaking to see this huge open chamber down under the ground.

There were many statues and carved pictures in the walls, a great chandlers hanging from the ceiling. We didn't have much time to take many photos, it was quite a cash cattle run of tourists, not very casual and relaxed hahahah.

Really skilled miners huh! These are just some of the cool sculptures found down there.

A close up of this 3D piece which I found really cool..

The biggest of the chandelier's in this chamber - hard to believe its made also entirely of salt!

Here is a statue of the pope, and if not mistaken this was made from the only miner that actually had studied sculpting out of all the workers.

And, from behind.. (suits you sir!)

Also down in the mine was a few lakes, which are completely saturated with salt. If I remember correctly, in each liter of water there is around 350 grams of salt, the most amount of salt that can be in saltwater at one time. Its almost impossible to drown in it as it has the same properties as the dead sea. One time scuba divers wanted to explore the bottom and had to use a lot of added weights to be able to sink down into it.

I'd be dammed if you would see me getting all the way up there to paint the wood! This was one amazing structure!

The chandeliers are all made from salt that has been somehow refined and cleaned and reformed again to make the salt see through like glass.

The other lake on the tourist route was this one below, there was a boat at the end of the tunnel and as there is so much water in the mines that they are constantly redirecting and removing to stop the salt eroding away and destroying it all.

If I remember what the rushing tour guide said correctly, they used for some parts of the mining procedure boats to transport both workers and excavated salt around the mine.

Here's how pretty much all of the floor was looking like, even steps were carved from the salt.

Of course I had to lick my finger, wipe the wall, and taste if there was salt on my finger afterwards, and there was but it wasn't like salt that we have for adding to our food. There were also many different kinds of salt in layers in the walls, where platonic movements had occurred over the past, which created different kinds and purity's of the salt.

We then went to a huge chamber, it was huge! I was thinking there would be no way of telling what way up the picture was so I added my finger just to make sure.

This wasn't the end of the tour but we were pressed so much for time that I didn't take much more photos!

Varietys of salt

Here's some great examples of various salts and the colours are awesome also. After this part we luckily didn't have to walk back up to the surface as there was a lift to take us back up. It was enough space for 9 people to be squeezed into. It was the same lift as miners used to get in and out of the mine, and for safety reasons it only really had to be long enough and wide enough to get a injured worker on a stretcher inside it so it was like 3m x 1.5m in size.