Cut from a mountain, drilled from a kilometre-deep well, or dried in terraced pools on a hillside — the same white mineral built every one of these places.
The name means 'salt castle' — barges of salt were taxed on the river below the town from the 8th century onward. The Dürrnberg seam that fed them had been dug by Celts since around 600 BC, and the trade paid for the cathedral, the palaces and the fortress on the rock.
Table salt was cut here from the 13th century until 1996, making it one of the longest-running industrial operations on Earth, and it went onto the very first UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978. The Chapel of St Kinga, 101 metres down, has altars, statues and floor tiles all carved from rock salt.
China's salt capital drilled the Shenhai well in 1835 to a depth of 1,001.42 metres — the first borehole anywhere to pass a kilometre, sunk with bamboo cable and human-powered percussion. It still yields brine and natural gas today.
The second-largest salt mine on Earth cuts around 385,000 tonnes a year from a seam laid down some 600 million years ago. Almost every grain of 'pink Himalayan' salt sold in the world comes from here — though the Salt Range is its own low ridge out on the Punjab plain, with the first Himalayan foothills still more than 100 km further north.
About 4,500 shallow pans — each roughly five square metres, none deeper than 30 centimetres — are fed by one hypersaline spring. Families inherit the right to work individual pools, a communal arrangement in place since at least Inca times, and the pink salt is still raked out by hand.
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