Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá — salt mine
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá

Catedral de Sal

  • 2 min read
  • 5.019° N 74.009° W

Interesting facts

  • Salt has been mined at Zipaquirá since around the 5th century BC, when the Muisca people exploited the deposits.
  • Alexander von Humboldt studied the mines in 1801 and judged the deposit larger than the great salt mines of Spain, Poland and Tyrol.
  • The salt itself formed more than 200 million years ago and was pushed up above the plateau when the Andes were raised.
  • Despite its name, it is not officially a cathedral, because it has no bishop.
  • The present design was chosen from 44 entries in a 1990 competition organised by the Colombian Society of Architects.
  • The new cathedral was carved about 60 metres below the old one, largely by enlarging chambers left by earlier mining.
  • The cross carved into the end wall of the central nave is about 16 metres tall.
  • Deep in the main nave stands a marble Creation of Man, carved by Carlos Enrique Rodríguez Arango as a homage to Michelangelo.
  • The first salt cathedral, opened in 1954, was 120 metres long and 22 metres high and could hold up to 8,000 people.
  • In the old cathedral, a cascade of water represented the River Jordan and the baptism of Christ.

Why it is worth it

Some 200 metres inside a mountain of rock salt on the edge of Zipaquirá, miners and sculptors have carved an entire church out of the mountain itself. The Salt Cathedral is reached by a long descending tunnel lined with fourteen small chapels, one for each Station of the Cross, where crosses and kneeling steps have been cut directly from the grey-white halite. Soft coloured lighting picks out the texture of the walls, and the salt, streaked and faintly glittering, makes every surface feel both mineral and oddly soft.

The miners of Zipaquirá carved their own small sanctuary underground around 1932. A first, larger cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary was opened in 1954 in older galleries; it was closed in 1992 because of structural concerns. Its successor was built deeper in the mountain from 1991 to a design by the architect Roswell Garavito Pearl, who won a competition for the commission, and it was inaugurated on 16 December 1995.

The new cathedral is laid out as a journey. After the Stations come a domed space and then three great parallel naves hewn from the salt, which the design links to the birth, life and death of Christ. Four massive cylindrical columns stand for the four Evangelists, and at the end of the central nave a huge cross is carved in low relief into the back wall, lit so that it seems to float. Marble sculpture is set among the salt carving. The whole is an unusual work of modern religious architecture, made by subtraction rather than construction, and it has been named one of the seven wonders of Colombia.

The cathedral is still a place of worship, drawing around 3,000 people on Sundays, and it is the centrepiece of a salt park above ground that includes a museum.

Getting there

The cathedral lies on the edge of the town of Zipaquirá, less than a kilometre from the centre and about 49 km north of Bogotá. The nearest airport is Bogotá's El Dorado International Airport (BOG), about 38 km away. Zipaquirá can be reached by road on National Highway 45A, and by the Tren Turístico de la Sabana heritage train from Bogotá.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Colombia 11The Most Remarkable Salt Mines 6The Greatest Modern Engineering Wonders 26The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá is an underground Roman Catholic church built within the tunnels of a salt mine 200 metres (660 ft) underground in a halite mountain near the city of Zipaquirá, in Cundinamarca, Colombia. It is a tourist destination and place of pilgrimage in the country.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

5.01876, -74.00930per Wikidata