The “Wieliczka” Salt Mine is over 700 years old. It is one of the most well-known tourist attractions of Poland. The work of several dozen generations of Polish miners has shaped the underground world into most amazing, spectacular and dazzling forms as: fabulous chapels with rock salt sculptures and bass reliefs, original constructions supporting the excavated walls and ceilings of passages and chambers as well as the underground salt lakes.
A French traveller of the seventeenth century, compared the salt mine with the Egyptian pyramids writing for Le Laboureur: “The Saline Works of Wieliczka are not less magnificent than the Egyptian pyramids, but certainly more useful as they are a commendable memento of the Polish people’s assiduity, whilst the pyramids confirm but the vanity and tyranny of the Egyptians.”
As a unique element of heritage, the Salt Mine was registered at UNESCO’s First World List of Cultural and Natural Heritage, in 1978, and recognised as a Historical Monument by the President of the Republic of Poland, in 1994.
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