Tag Archives: Wieliczka salt mines

Jul20

The mines of Wieliczka – Part 4, the Miner’s Route

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Monday, 24-June-2024


After exploring the graduation tower, and braving the heat and light of the day, I was ready to descend back into the cool salty depths of the welcoming Earth.

I mentioned that, back when I was first looking at visiting Wieliczka, I realize that I’d need to book tours to explore the mines. And that, if I needed to book them anyways, I may as well pre-book… so I went online, read up on the options, and tracked down some tickets. I picked the Tourist’s route, of course, as it was the most popular and most extensive… but I saw a second options as well called The Miner’s Route.

The Miner’s route included a disclaimer – warning me that it would be dark, include some scrambling through tight place, and would be a bit more physically challenging than the Tourist’s Route. After seeing that, all hesitation left my mind and I got the tickets locked in.


We started off in a locker room, gearing up for our shift in the mines.

It was fairly straightforward, but still quite interesting – We had our overalls, of course, but were also issued / given a hardhat, helmet lamp, and an emergency CO2 filter mask. Cool, and a fun part of the experience, right? Well, yes… but also legally required, it turns out. See, part of this tour was that we were going into some of the semi-working mine areas. While Wieliczka isn’t a truly “Active” mine anymore, they do still extract about 10,000 tons of salt per year. That’s mainly to fill their giftshop, and pales in comparison to the 203,000 tons per year that the mine produced at its height in the interwar period from 1918 to 1939… though it quite impressive in comparison to the 8,000 tons per year extracted by the laborers back in the 14th and 15th centuries.

That brief history lesson aside, we were required to carry safety gear with us – though with the interesting caveat that the safety gear is required for coal mines, and wouldn’t be helpful in a salt mine… Which, in my mind at least, cemented the guide’s credibility. Since, let’s be honest, legal codes being written for something else, and ignoring the small outlier, really fits well with my understanding of the world we live in.

We finished gearing up, and headed into the mines.

A map of the mines, courtesy of the Wieliczka website!







The Miner’s Route was, unsurprisingly, not nearly as touristy-picturesque as the Tourist’s Route. Instead, it was more of a dive into the workings of the mines – how miners had actually extracted the salt, how they’d built the mines, and what sort of condition’s they’d had to contend with.

One of the most interesting, to me at least, was compaction – as time wore on, the mines would settle and the remaining salt would compact. The wooden support pillars would take on the weight, in theory, but over time they’d slowly get crushed until they reached an equilibrium… Our “foreman” stopped us at one area to show just how intense the compaction was – the tunnel we were currently in had shrunk significantly before reaching equilibrium, with one specific wooden log being crushed to about 1/3 of its original thickness!


We walked, navigated the corridors using a map, scrambled through small passageways, tested the air for methane, and even sawed a log! Best of all, we were “paid” for our work with small chunks of rocksalt! Interestingly, approximately the same amount that a laborer would have been paid in ages past – instead of being paid in currency, we learned, the laborers were simply paid in chucks of salt as it was equally valuable to hard coinage of the time.



While the Miner’s route wasn’t as picturesque as the Tourist’s Route, it was absolutely lovely. I believe we spent a full 3 hours in the mines, with our exploring and various activities, though it definitely felt like less. In the end we were given our miner’s certificates, took the elevator up, and returned our safety gear (thankfully) unexpended.

I packed back up my things, called myself a cab, and headed back to Krakow for some well earned dinner… amazing memories in my head, photos in my camera, and one major life goal completed.

Hurray for Wieliczka!

Jul19

The mines of Wieliczka – Part 2, the Museum Route

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Monday, 24-June-2024


Satiated after having an amazing meal in the underground dining area of the Mines, I pressed onward.

I was now 125m (410ft) deep, and had a few hours before my second tour of the day… but I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with that time. During the Tourist’s Route tour, our guide had mentioned two options that had caught my attention – The Museum Route, and the Graduation Tower. One aboveground, and one directly off the restaurant and included in the price of the Tourist’s Route tour.

I started off with the Museum Route tour – since it started right at the exit of the restaurant I’d just gorged myself in, and I didn’t quite want to leave the cool salty air of the mines just yet. I’d been braving the heat of the summer ever since leaving Iceland (though with a lovely respite in the Baltics!), and the cold air was feeling absolutely glorious.

Getting to the route was pretty simple – I walked out of the restaurant, and I stood in line. Yup, simple.

Soon enough the tour guide arrived, said her greetings, and we headed further down into the depths. This time we didn’t take any staircases, though, simply following a tunnel that sloped gently downward (if it even descended at all). She showed us a few chambers off to the side as we walked, before we came to the main exhibit of the tour – the Wieliczka museum!



The Museum wasn’t particularly large, being made up of maybe a dozen small rooms with displays and placards. A small city museum, I’d probably have spent about an hour and a half in here if I’d been left to my own devices.

I wasn’t left to my own devices, however, as the rules were pretty clear that no one was allowed to explore the mines on their own. Something about Balrogs, I think. Instead of perusing at my own pace, then, I was part of a whole group visiting the museum together… with a tour guide at the head. A tour guide who, with no significant offence intended, may have been training for a marathon in parallel with guiding.

Instead of an hour and a half, we finished in just about 40min.

True story – I didn’t even get to read the placards until I went through the photos for this post. I had opportunity to quickly snap pictures of about 2/3 of the exhibits, and even then the guide was making it pretty clear that I was holding up the whole group… either myself, or a pair of guys from the UK who were dressed in what I assume was period-appropriate outfits. They were awesome, and between the three of us I think the guide came close to simply hogtieing us all and dragging us behind her in the spring to finish the tour.


It bummed me out quite a bit, if that wasn’t clear.

There were so many interesting things on display – from minerals and interesting finds, to historic documents, to tools that had been used in the depths and recovered for display. Heck, there was even a hologram of the Papal seal, stored with the signed document from the Pope’s visit… in a chapel that frankly felt less at home on Earth and more at home on a mining asteroid, or perhaps the Elemental Plane of Earth.

Our guide did give some interesting factoids, of course, but they were mainly washed away from my mind by the simple fact that I was always rushing to try and see some of the historic memorabilia that the tour was supposedly about.

Regardless, the adventure lasted 40min, and soon enough I was heading topside, out of the comfortable dark caverns and salty air, back into the bright light and flowered scents of the world above…

Jul19

The mines of Wieliczka – Part 1, the Tourist Route

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Monday, 24-June-2024


I woke up Monday morning earlier than normal, scarfed down a pair of protein bars and sipped down an instant latte, called a Bolt (ride-share service), and got on the road to Wieliczka.

This was the morning. The day that I’d tick an item off my top-level bucket list. An item that’d been there pretty much as long as I can remember.

The Wieliczka salt mines of Poland.

I can’t tell you when I first heard of them, though my memory tells me that I’d heard that they had inspired Peter Jackson in his direction for the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring… Looking online today, I can’t find anything to corroborate that memory, but I’m keeping it as my own. So… 2001 era, nearly 20 years.

The culmination of 20 years of desire to see the underground caves that had inspired Dwarven architecture throughout fantasy – from Lord of the Rings to Dragon Age, from World of Warcraft to The Witcher, and countless others.

I arrived just before my tour started. Hopped out of the car, rushed to the entryway to join my tour group, and descended into the mines.


A map of the mines, courtesy of the Wieliczka website!

I’d actually booked this tour a few months ago, after learning that there’s no unsupervised exploration of the salt mines allowed – which makes sense, from a safety perspective, but still made me a little sad.

Anyways, the tour guide was lovely, his English was excellent, and our descent precipitous – the start of the tour was 380 steps, taking us 64m (210ft) into the Earth. As the tour progressed, we’d continue lower of course, but for now we started into the long dark of the first level…

Which wasn’t really dark, truth be told. But holy crap was it beautiful! The whole mine was salt and timber – the remains of an ancient prehistoric sea, compressed into solid rock salt, and the timber used to reinforce the tunnels that the miners had dug throughout the deposit. Pretty much everything you see in the pictures is one of those two materials – the walls, ceilings, and floor may have been carved to look like tile, or brick, or other stone… but shine a light up to them (or lick them, which is supposedly a tradition for Polish schoolkids) and you’ll quickly realize that they’re simply… salt.

The air carried the tang of salt as well – from what our guide told us, miners here (along with the horses that assisted them) actually tended to live healthier lives that those top-side… and were far healthier than any similar coal miners. Similar to living by the ocean, the salt of the mines being quite good for the respiratory system. It was cool, fairly quiet, and simply gorgeous.



As we descended deeper, we saw more and more chambers – all carved deep into the salt as the miners had dove deeper. We learned more history from our guide (and the omni-present informational placards) – learning how the mines had first been discovered thousands of years back by Neolithic tribes, who boiled the briney water from the nearby springs to get the salt needed to preserve their food and supplement their diets.

We learned about the Polish queen who, in years past, requested a team of miners as a dowery… and who then led the development of the mines. Mines that, it turned out, generated nearly 30% of the entire revenue of the Polish Crown at their height.



I could go on for hours about all the amazing things I learned, and the stunning sights that I saw. We spent nearly three hours on the Tourist Route – three hours of absolute wide-eyed joy on my part. I can’t describe how much I enjoyed the adventure, and as a bonus I learned about a few more salt mines in the area that I jotted down as ideas for future trips…

For now, though, the tourist route tour ended. Finishing up at the “Miner’s Cafe”, we were perfectly timed as hunger (and a need for some coffee) was starting to tickle the back of my mind. I thanked the guide, got some amazing lunch and some glorious dippin’ dots ice cream, and prepared myself for the next phase of the adventure – the Museum Route!