Slănic Salt Mine

The Slănic salt mine, in the hill town of Slănic in Romania's Prahova County, about 100 km north of Bucharest, is less a tunnel than a buried cathedral. Its Unirea level, 208 metres below the surface, is a single run of fourteen chambers cut with a trapezoidal profile: about 10 metres wide at the ceiling, 32 metres at the floor, and some 54 metres high, with walls leaning in at sixty degrees. Salt was taken out of the rock in slices 2.2 metres thick, working downward from the roof, and the walls still carry the regular grooves of that work, banded in greys and ambers. In all, about 2.9 million cubic metres of salt were removed, leaving a hollow of around 80,000 square metres.

Salt has been dug here for more than three centuries. In 1685 the Wallachian official Mihai Cantacuzino bought the Slănic estate intending to mine it, and the first workings opened in 1688; in 1713 he gave estate and mines to the Colțea Monastery in Bucharest. The modern shape of the mine goes back to 1852, when Prince Barbu Știrbei asked Emperor Franz Joseph for a mining engineer and was sent Carol Karacsony, head of the mine at Ocna Dej, who introduced the trapezoidal chambers first used at Wieliczka in Poland. Successive mines followed: Carol I in 1867, Mihai in 1912 (the first salt mine in Romania with electric light) and finally Unirea, opened in 1938 under the Belgian engineer Maurice Bodart and worked from 1943 to 1970, when extraction stopped and the chambers were given over to visitors.

The air below stays at around 12–13 °C all year, with pressure a little higher than at the surface, and many visitors come for the microclimate, which some believe eases breathing problems. The chambers now hold sports courts and play areas, but also salt sculpture: in the room its author Iustin Năstase called the Genesis Hall, the Dacian king Decebal and the Roman emperor Trajan face each other carved in salt, and elsewhere there are busts of the poet Mihai Eminescu and a relief of Michael the Brave. The upper Mihai level, separated from Unirea by a 40-metre floor of salt, has hosted model-aircraft contests, because its rooms, 66 metres high, are big enough to fly in.

The mine nearly ended in 1994, when rain and groundwater poured down the shaft, dissolving the salt and flooding Unirea. Four years of work lining the shaft with concrete and filling cavities saved it, and it was opened to visitors again in 1998. Above ground, a short walk from the mine, is the Salt Mountain, a massif of bare salt with a water-filled old working that local people call the Bride's Grotto.

Getting there

Slănic is about 24 km from Băicoi and roughly 100 km north of Bucharest. The nearest airport is Brașov-Ghimbav International Airport (GHV), about 62 km away across the Carpathians. Visitors descend to the Unirea level by minibus.