The Salt Mine

When I was in this part of the world with my family years ago, we visited a salt-mine in Switzerland. I remember putting on the traditional salt miner uniform, entering the mine on a little train, and sliding from shaft to shaft on wooded slides just like the miners used to do. I discovered that there was the same kind of mine in the mountains above Hallstatt and decided I like it so much the first time, I should go check it out. I took the funicular up the mountain and walked the fifteen minutes through beautiful wildflower filled meadows to the mine, which just looked like a mountain house and a few other buildings. Along the way there were poles with information about the salt trade and the region, and I learned that early people first found the salt in the mountains around 800AD by following animals who liked to lick the salty ground. The trade boomed from that time on and the salt was often referred to as “white gold”. Today the mine is privately owned and the mine still produces salt for the market.


The tour of the mine is similar to the one we went on years ago, where you have to dress like an old-fashioned miner, you take a little train, and you slide down large wooden slides to get from shaft to shaft. Since I was alone, however, I felt a little weird dressing up but everyone else was doing it so I did too. Our tour guide gave each little speech in German and then English, and each German version took about twice as long as the English version so I wondered if she was leaving things out of if German just takes that much longer to say the same things…..Her English also wasn’t that good so I missed a lot of what she was saying.

The coolest part of the tour was when we entered a cave a few hundred feet below the surface of the mountain. There was a lake remaining from when the shaft was filled with water to get the salt out in liquid form (called brining….they fill a cave with water, pump out the water, then get the salt out….it took about 100 years of doing this until this particular cave was salt-free). Because there’s no natural light, it’s really confusing to decipher what is the ceiling above the lake and what is the floor below the lake. There is also no wind, so the surface of the water is entirely still and the reflections are perfect. At this point of the tour, the salt mine has created a Disney World like light and sound show showing the early people coming to the area and mining the salt. It was far better than anything I’ve ever seen in Florida, and created some really cool optical illusions where you couldn’t really tell what you were looking at (floor, wall, ceiling, water?!?)

After the mine tour I decided to have lunch at a restaurant on top of the mountain overlooking the lake, and the views were truly spectacular. It was a pretty clear day, and you could see Hallstatt and the neighboring towns. You could also see a river that ran into the lake, and you could see the difference of the colors of water where the river emptied into it. I decided to walk down to Hallstatt rather than take the funicular back down, and I had a nice hike alone on the trial (I literally didn’t run into one other person) with more gorgeous views of the lake.