Khewra Salt Mine
Interesting facts
- Much of the pink rock salt sold around the world as Himalayan salt is actually cut from this mine in the Salt Range.
- Miners take out only about half the salt and leave the rest standing as pillars, so the mountain keeps holding itself up.
- The workings are stacked on nineteen levels, eleven of them below ground.
- The salt beds are Ediacaran to early Cambrian in age, laid down more than 500 million years ago.
- The Assembly Hall chamber rises about 75 metres, and the pillarless salt bridge of Pul-e-Sarat spans a brine pool some 25 metres deep.
- Inside the mine the air stays at about 18–20 °C all year round.
- It is also called the Mayo Salt Mine, after Lord Mayo, who visited it as Viceroy of India.
- Under Sikh rule Khewra was held by Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu, while the general Hari Singh Nalwa controlled the nearby Warcha mine.
- The engineer H. Warth, who modernised the mine, also introduced lathes for turning decorative objects out of rock salt.
- In 2003 a plan to store Pakistan's strategic oil reserves inside the mine was judged feasible but turned down.
Why it is worth it
The Khewra Salt Mine is a world hollowed out of rock salt inside the hills of the Salt Range in Punjab, and what makes it memorable is colour. The walls of its tunnels and chambers are pure halite in shades of brick red, rose, pale pink, off-white and clear crystal, banded where different layers meet, and in the visitor galleries they are lit from behind and within so that whole surfaces glow. Some forty kilometres of tunnels run through the mountain on many levels, reaching around 730 metres in from the entrance, and it is counted as the second-largest salt mine in the world.
Local legend dates the discovery of the salt to the passage of Alexander the Great's army in the fourth century BC, when horses were seen licking the rocks and recovered from their sickness. Whatever the truth of the story, salt has been dug here for a very long time, and the mine still produces hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year. Its modern layout owes much to the mining engineer H. Warth, who in 1872, under British rule, reorganised the workings and put the mine on a modern footing; the great chambers left by generations of cutting feel like the halls of an underground cathedral.
A section of the old workings has been opened to visitors, who ride in on a small train along a narrow-gauge line first laid in the British period. The route passes through a huge chamber known as the Assembly Hall, across a brine pool by a slender salt bridge called Pul-e-Sarat, and past a small mosque built entirely of coloured salt bricks and lit from within. Another chamber, the Sheesh Mahal or Palace of Mirrors, shows the pale pink crystal at its most luminous. Since 2007 a small clinic inside the mine has used its dry, salt-laden air for respiratory therapy. Around a quarter of a million people visit each year.
Getting there
The mine is on the edge of the town of Khewra, in the Pind Dadan Khan area of Jhelum District. It is about 160 km from both Islamabad and Lahore, and the nearest international airport is Islamabad (ISB), about 100 km away in a straight line. The usual approach is by road along the M-2 motorway between the two cities, turning off towards the Salt Range for the final stretch.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Khewra Salt Mine, also known as Mayo Salt Mine, is the world's second largest salt mine, located in Khewra in the Jhelum District of Punjab, Pakistan. The mine is in the Salt Range of the Pothohar Plateau, which rises from the Indus Plain of the Punjab.
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