Catedral de Sal

There are only 3 underground salt cathedrals in the world, 2 in Poland and 1 in Colombia guess which one we've visited?

To explain what we saw, our story starts millions of years ago, when the planet was dominated by dinosaurs... at that time most of Colombia was underwater. Then the surface of the earth changed creating mountains and heating up and evaporating the salty water, leaving a huge condensed salt dome which stretches for miles underground. It was the indigenous that found the salty properties of this area, by collecting water from the river, which flowed out from the salt dome, and cooking it in clay pots, evaporating the water, leaving just the salt. They used it as a show of wealth and created a town who's chief were called Zipa. Then the Spanish conquered the indigenous town and exploited the indigenous population to dig into the mountain and manually mine the salt. As our technology moved on so did the mining techniques employed at the Zipa salt mine, from manual tools, to dynamite, electric hand tools to large heavy machinery and finally high pressure water extraction.
As the mine became larger and more workers were in involved in the process, in 1954 the first salt cathedral was built. Working in mines is dangerous so it was common for miners to create altars and that's how the idea took place. In the 70's this became a tourist attraction but the cathedral was unstable and it was unsafe as it was in an older part of the mine. This leads us to the requirement for a big project, led by the architect Carlos Enrique Rodriguez who decided to use the lower and newer tunnels of the mine to build the new cathedral. It opened 1995 and it is the one that is still visited now.

To enter the cathedral we had to walk along a corridor that leads us through 14 small chapels representing the Station of the Cross (Jesus' last journey). The representations are very abstract and even listening to the audio guides thorough explanations, what we saw really was just a succession of crosses carved into the salt walls. It was quite impressive to see nonetheless and the lights and music added a church atmosphere. This path ends 180m below ground to the main cathedral nave, three hughe caverns that are interconnected with little passages which are still today used as sites of worship.

As it has been voted the first maravilla (wonders) of Colombia this has also brought a full street of shops, cafes and even a spa underground. Very strange atmosphere!Read more