Cardona salt mountain
Montaña de sal de Cardona
Interesting facts
- As quoted by the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, Cato the Elder described a mountain of pure salt in Spain that grew back as fast as it was cut.
- Archaeological work has traced salt extraction in the Cardona valley back more than 6,500 years.
- At 1,308.7 metres, the potash mine beneath the mountain became the deepest mine in Spain.
- From 1923 until its closure the mine was run by the explosives and chemicals group Unión Explosivos Río Tinto, later Ercros.
- The workforce peaked at 560 miners in 1986, only four years before the shafts were shut for good.
- Rainwater dissolving the salt has carved true karst features into the mountain, the best known being a cavity called the Forat Micó.
- The Salt Mountain cultural park belongs to the network of the Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia and draws over 70,000 visitors a year.
Why it is worth it
Beside the hilltop town of Cardona in central Catalonia, a mountain of salt breaks through the ground: a jagged, eroded landscape of rock salt rising on the right bank of the Cardener river, overlooked by the castle on its hill above the town. Beneath it, the galleries of an old mine lead deep into the salt itself.
The Salt Mountain is a diapir, a body of salt that has pushed its way up through the overlying rock and is still rising slowly. The salt was laid down by the evaporation of an inland sea in the Upper Eocene, when the rise of the Pyrenees cut off part of the basin of the Ebro from the open ocean. Three minerals are found here: halite, or common salt, together with the potassium salts sylvite and carnallite. The depression in which the mountain sits measures about 1,800 by 600 metres, and the whole area covers some 100 hectares. The salt is often translucent, and large masses are clear enough to see through.
People have taken salt from Cardona since the Neolithic, and the deposit was worked in Roman times. For thousands of years extraction was done in the open air, by hand; only in the eighteenth century did gunpowder change the method. In the early twentieth century the engineer Emili Viader i Solé identified potash in the deposit, and the first shaft, the Pou del Duc, was sunk between 1902 and 1905. Underground mining eventually reached a depth of more than 1,300 metres and removed nearly 38 million tonnes of mineral before the potash mine closed in September 1990. Since 2003 part of the old Mina Nieves has been open as the cultural park of the Salt Mountain, with galleries visited at a depth of 86 metres. Local craftsmen have long carved Cardona salt into figures and ornaments. The surrounding area is protected as a natural area and as part of the Natura 2000 network.
Getting there
Cardona lies in the Bages comarca of the province of Barcelona, about 90 km northwest of Barcelona. The nearest large town is Manresa, about 23 km away. The nearest airport is Andorra–La Seu d'Urgell Airport (LEU), about 53 km away; the main international airport for the region is Barcelona–El Prat (BCN).
On these lists
41.90587, 1.67901per Wikidata