Wieliczka salt mine

The miners carved chapels into the rock salt. There are four of them down there, along with an underground lake and a crowd of statues.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine sits in the town of Wieliczka near Krakow in southern Poland. Salt has been produced on this spot since Neolithic times, when it came from brine welling up to the surface. Digging proper began in the 13th century, and the mine went on producing table salt without a break until 1996, making it one of the oldest operating salt mines in the world. Falling salt prices and flooding ended the commercial work.

The numbers are hard to hold in your head. The mine reaches 327 metres deep and its horizontal passages and chambers run for more than 287 kilometres. The visitor route is 3.5 kilometres long, which is less than two per cent of the total. One thing surprises everybody: the rock salt is not white. It comes in varying shades of grey and looks more like unpolished granite than anything you would put on food.

The paperwork goes back a very long way. The first documentation dates from 1044, when Casimir I granted a privilege and monks were collecting salt here. From the late 13th to the early 14th century the Saltworks Castle was built above it, and the mine was run throughout its history by the Krakow Salt Mines company. Wieliczka now houses the Krakow Saltworks Museum.

UNESCO lists it jointly with the neighbouring mine at Bochnia and the Wieliczka Saltworks Castle as one serial property, describing the deposit as mined since the 13th century, of royal status, and the oldest industrial undertaking of its type in Europe. The listing values the two mines for showing the development of European mining technique across seven centuries, from the 13th to the 20th, with hundreds of kilometres of galleries holding artworks, chapels and statues cut from the salt.

It is a Polish Historic Monument as well. Go for the chapels; stay for the fact that men who spent their lives underground decided to make the place beautiful.