TURNING SALT INTO GOLD

In the Austrian Alps, generations of miners toiled to extract the ancient world’s most valuable resource

- Bridget Alex

Some 400 years ago in the Austrian Alps, a crew of miners dawdled outside their work site perched between a jagged, snowcapped peak and a sparkling lake. They savored the sunlight and pine-scented breeze—the last fresh air they’d inhale for hours—and then entered a tunnel cut horizontally into the mountainside. After a quarter-mile walk, lit by oil lamps, the workers reached the tunnel’s end and resumed burrowing through sheer rock, searching for salt deposits. They were opening a new salt mine at the Hapsburg emperor’s request.

They hammered and chiseled, inching farther into the salt mountain above the town of Hallstatt. Every so often, they lit and doused a small fire, making the rock face brittle and easier to fracture. Finding more salt was imperative. The Hapsburgs used the valuable commodity to finance their banquets, palaces, and wars. As one of Europe’s richest salt sources, Hallstatt “was the treasure chest of the Hapsburg monarchy,” says Kerstin Kowarik, an archaeologist at Natural History Museum Vienna.

But the workers found no glittering salt at the end of this tunnel. Instead, they struck a wall of hardened mud and waste left by earlier miners—pickax handles, burned splits of wood, frayed rope, and salt pieces too puny to collect. They’d have to start a new tunnel elsewhere on the mountain. Someone had already gutted this sector of its salt.