Krakow Salt Mine
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Actually, it's the Wieliczka Salt Mine, just outside Krakow.
As a general proposition, mines fill me with a certain sense of foreboding. You rarely hear any 'good news' mining stories - any news is almost always associated with some horrible disaster. Our first experience of a mine was when we were travelling around South America nearly thirty years ago and went down a silver mine in Potosi, in Bolivia. What a terrible place. The local population started working there from the age of about 13, they couldn't stand upright in any of the passages and the life expectancy of the workers was somewhere in their thirties, usually dying from some obscure lung disease.
My next brush with a mine was when my business partner and I acquired a coal mining company which had as its sole remaining asset an insurance claim, following another typical mining disaster - the collapse of a longwall, burying millions of dollars of equipment, followed by a spontaneous combustion event. Whilst I never visited the mine, we did learn a lot about mining, the R70 adiabatic test, the many pitfalls of mining, and the horrible human toll that working down the mines extracted. Fortunately for us, our claim was ultimately resolved in our favour, a significant factor in us now being able to travel the world.
With my limited previous experiences I wasn't initially enthused when Sarah suggested going down a Polish salt mine in the middle of winter. However, we joined the queues, paid our entry fee and ended up in a group of 35 English speaking tourists. Our tour guide was knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but spoke as I imagine would a cat being violently strangled (is there any other way?) I don't think I understood half of what she said during the whole hour and a half tour.
Anyway, the mine itself was impressive. It is extensive, contains many rock salt sculptures, mostly created by the miners themselves but more recently by professional sculptors and artists. It was a fully operational mine until 1996 and is still active, although not in the part open to the public. The mine is well lit these days, but it obviously wasn't always that way, and like mines the world over it used to be a very hazardous place to work. Interestingly, they painted the salt walls of the mine white, in order to be better able to navigate in the dim light of their torches, and those walls remain white to this day. It was considered bad luck for a woman to be down the mine, so it was entirely a male domain. The one silver lining was that unlike every other type of mine, the salt in the air (which is evidently a good thing) meant that miners very rarely suffered any respiratory problems.
Anyway, back to the mine. It is one of Poland's official national historic monuments, contains four chapels (full size!) carved out of the rock salt, hundreds of intricate sculptures, several lakes and about 100 miles of passageways (of which only 2.2 miles are open to the public). There's even an underground cafeteria at the end of the tour (and I can attest to it serving good Polish food).
It is believed that from as early as the 10th century or earlier people found salty pools in the area and then boiled that water in small clay vessels to produce salt. Because salt was such a good preservative and wasn't that easy to obtain, it was often used as barter payment. Over the subsequent years they had to go deeper into the pools to collect the water until eventually at the turn of the twelfth century they started creating wells. It was in the 13th century, while digging a well that the first rock salt was accidentally found (or so the story goes) and then they started excavating in the area of the wells using mining methods, leading to the beginnings of a mine just outside Krakow.
In the 14th and 15th centuries salt mining in Poland was extremely profitable, accounting for perhaps a third of its income, even though in reality they had done little more than scratch the surface of what was to become the 5th largest salt mine in the world.
Nowadays the working parts of the mine are not noticeable from outside, but the tourism side of the mine is run very professionally. It is such an amazing sight, with the statues, caverns, lakes and re-creations, that it is readily understandable why there is generally a half hour wait to join a tour, and these tours are conducted in at least 6 languages, in groups of 35, setting off every 10 minutes throughout the day. At 25 Euros a head the tourism (nearly 2 million visitors a year) is an important part of the local economy. A big tick from us at the end of the day.