How salt was mined

The extraction of the "white gold"

"Time had broken new ground in salt production." This sentence is written on a small board next to the staircase that leads to the Calvary Church in the Hallstatt district of Lahn. At this point, near the campsite, stood the Hallstatt Sudhütte. It was demolished in 1969. This ended an era that stretched over 650 years, because shortly after Queen Elisabeth granted the southern rights, in the year of the market survey (1311), Hallstatt received a brewing hut. Time has broken new ground in salt production. Today, it is deep works and borehole probes that determine Hallstatt's salt mining; Terms that the layman can't do much with. In one case, the brine is pumped up about 60 meters in a shaft via deep pumps, and a depth of 120 meters is even reached with the borehole probes. By the way: if a miner explains this to you and he uses the word "Teufe", this does not entitle you to assume that the man has a speech defect. The miner does not say depth, but depth.

Wet mining

The method of the normal workers is easier to explain: Between two horizons (this is the technical term for the floors in the mining system), a cavity is blasted out, which is connected to the upper horizon by an oblique connecting passage (Ankehrscharrf) and to the lower horizon by a discharge dam, so that the brine can drain off via a filter box. From the upper horizon, the room is filled with water up to the ceiling - here you would actually have to say "heaven" in mining. The water takes care of the dissolution of the salt. First and foremost, the salt is dissolved on the ceiling, because the brine is heavier than the water. The insoluble mountain parts - chunks and mud - sink to the bottom.

As soon as about 32 kilograms of salt are dissolved in one hundred liters of water, the brine is completely buried. It now rests for a few days, then the shut-off valve at the end of the pipe is opened, the brine is measured and fed into the brewhouses via the brine pipe. There it is heated, the water evaporates and the salt remains in a pure state. The expert calls the method used in Hallstatt "wet mining". The men who extracted salt from this mountain around 3000 years ago and to whom it is thanks that this small town in the Salzkammergut became the godfather of an entire epoch of human history had a completely different procedure than the Hallstatt miner of today.

Prehistoric mining

The miner of the Hallstatt period pursued the pure rock salt deposits and extracted the salt exclusively in dry mining. He broke it out of the mountain in solid chunks and thus brought it into the trade. He went up to 330 meters underground. With a daily working time of twelve hours, it took a month to achieve one metre of drifting. By comparison, today you can do more in one day with one blast, namely 1.3 meters. The total length of the prehistoric tunnel system was 3750 meters. Even without doing any further calculations, one can imagine how much work the people of the Hallstatt period have invested in their mine over many generations.

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