Poland: Krakow (Wieliczka Salt Mine)

On our first day in Krakow, I decided to indulge in Emma's love for geology and mining and head with her to an underground salt mine at the edge of Krakow. Wait, maybe it's my love for geology and mining🤔...who knows🤷🏻‍♂️ but we went there anyway. So now a salt mine might not sound like many people's idea of a fun day out, but this is no ordinary salt mine! Well, if anything, this place feels like you've just walked onto a Lord of the Rings fantasy set and I was almost surprised to NOT see little dwarves running around with their mining tools. Blocks of salt have been excavated here since the 13th century that they've now dug out 200km of tunnels underground! It was also due to this salt mine that Poland was relatively wealthy in the middle ages due to salt being such a highly valuable commodity in those days. So much so, that the mine used to pay the miners in salt and that's how the word 'salary' came about. What is interesting about this place, is that the miners would spend really long periods underground. So because of this, they essentially built a 'town' underground! All carved into the salt! This included a chapel, a bar, a dining hall and even horses! They also supported all these cavernous halls and passageways with wood which was interesting as one would expect the wood to decay with time. But, seemingly counterintuitively, this is not the case! The salt acts as an antibacterial preventing decay and the wood actually gets stronger with salt and its dehydrating properties, meaning that some of the wood is 100s of years old! Iron/steel is not used at all as it'll just rust away, thus, even after the age of industrialisation, they continued to use just horses/ropes and counter balances to get the salt to the surface as machinery wouldn't last long in the mine. The mine closed about 15 years ago as it's now too expensive to mine salt vs the surface dehydration methods used these days. Still an unbelievable place and it's amazing what has been carved just out of salt!Read more