Hallstatt, the oldest salt mine

Hallstatt squeezes onto a narrow strip between the southwest shore of the Hallstätter See and the steep slopes of the Dachstein. The name means salt settlement, and the salt lies in the mountain behind the town, in rock laid down from the late Permian into the early Triassic. Salzwelten, which runs the mine, calls it the oldest salt mine in the world and counts 7,000 years of history in it.

Systematic salt making here goes back to the Middle Bronze Age, late in the second millennium BC, when natural brine was caught in vessels and evaporated. Underground mining began at the end of the Bronze Age and resumed in the eighth century BC, when a stratified, highly organised society with trade links across Europe grew prosperous on it. Archaeologists named a whole era after the place: the Hallstatt culture of the early European Iron Age, about 800 to 450 BC.

In 1846 Johann Georg Ramsauer found a large prehistoric cemetery at the Salzberg mines and spent the rest of the century excavating it, eventually recording 1,045 burials whose grave goods display the wealth salt brought. No settlement has been found, perhaps because the later village covers it. Inside the mountain the salt preserved textiles, wood and leather, shoes, scraps of cloth, tools and miners' backpacks. Major activity stopped around 500 BC for reasons that remain unclear, by which time the workings had grown very deep. Mining continued in Roman times and revived in the 14th century.

The town has always had very little ground. Until the first road was blasted along the west shore in 1890, Hallstatt could be reached only by boat or on narrow trails. Space was so short that bones used to be exhumed every ten years to make room for new burials and moved to the ossuary in St Michael's Chapel, which holds more than 1,200 skulls, 600 of them painted with names, symbols and dates. A fire in 1750 destroyed the timber buildings, and the town was rebuilt in late Baroque style. UNESCO inscribed the Hallstatt-Dachstein Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape in 1997.

A funicular now climbs to the high valley, with a Skywalk 360 metres above the village, and the tour goes into the mountain by mine train, down the miners' slides and past an underground salt lake. The village had 780 residents in 2020 and estimates of 10,000 to nearly 30,000 visitors a day, and since autumn 2020 tour buses have needed booked time slots.