Of salt mines and white gold

Salt is the stuff of life... apparently. Try living without it, or at least try living in the Middle Ages without it. Salt is what gave Salzburg its wealth, and its name.
Kendra and I decided to do something a little different yesterday: we toured a salt mine! The tour took us approximately 1 km in and 200 meters down inside a mountain. The Salzwelten at Hallein is the largest mine in Europe open to visitors. It's looked over by the two strange peaks we tried to photograph. Those pesky clouds!

A little history before the fun stuff.

The Celts were the first to mine salt out of this mountain, starting back around 500 b.c. until the first century A.D. It then lay undisturbed for a millenium until about 1185 when it was rediscovered. Along with the salt, a few surprises were unearthed in the form of bodies of celtic miners, perfectly preserved by the salt. At first the mine was considered to be haunted, since the new miners thought they were the first ones to have found the treasure in the mountain, and thought the preserved bodies were ghosts. Evidence of mining in the celtic period continues to surface to this day.

The miners in the Middle Ages soon realized it was too big a job for traditional tools, so they used an innovative technique of pumping water from higher up the mountain into the cavities of the cave. The water would carve out new spaces and dissolve the salt in the rock, forming a saturated brine solution. This brine was then transported out of the mountain using km-long wooden pipes to the nearby town of Hallein (from the celtic word for salt), to large boilers that would, you guessed it, boil off the water and leave behind the salt. This salt was so valuable that they called it "white gold". The boilers required a lot of fuel, and this was provided by cutting down trees on all the nearby hillsides and sending the logs down the Salzach river to Hallein.

In the 1500's, Wolfgang Dietrich von Raitenau become prince-archibishop of Salzburg. He took full advantage of the wealth from the nearby salt mines both for his own profit, and the enrichment of Salzburg. When half the city burned down due to a candle being knocked over by his clumsy treasurer (so the story goes), von Raitenau is purported to have said, "if it's burning, let it burn." He then took the opportunity to rebuild Salzburg according to his taste, with inspiration from the Italian architecture he had admired in his youth spent in Italy. His aim was to make Salzburg into a model Renaissance town. He must have succeeded to some extent, for he is remembered to this day for his building plans and achievements, and Salzburg itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Now for the fun! The tour started with a fashion makeover with protective white garb. Don't we look fabulous!

A short walk to a little train, where we straddled a long wooden bench, sandwiched in (literally, the guide kept calling out, "sandwichen!") together. Into the mountain, through ever narrower tunnels. Then a short walk to another larger chamber for the first movie clip. Throughout the tour we got little snippets of the story I told above, acted out by von Raitenau and his clumsy treasurer to make it more interesting.

Next stop was a short ride down a wooden slide! These slides were apparently used by the miners to reach lower levels quickly. Apparently they also used to organize slide parties for visitors to the mine.


A barge carried us across an underground brine lake, formed by pouring water into the mine from above. The ceiling was unnaturally flat, and showed some wave marks where the water must have eroded the rock.

We crossed over to Germany underground, then later back into Austria through a different tunnel. No wonder Bavaria thought this mine should be theirs!

A second longer slide took us to the lowest point of the tour. Here there was a chamber where one of the celtic bodies had been found (of course replaced with a replica). Then a long escalator back up to the train level, and out to the surface.

A few things I learned: I don't think I would enjoy working in a mine, the wooden slides were a blast, and there's a lot more salt under mountains than I ever knew!