Wieliczka Salt Mine Tour + Hairdressing Duties

Our planned activity for today was a tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine. We booked it online last night. Wieliczka is a town about 12 km from the centre of Kraków. Maybe it’s considered an outer suburb of Kraków—I’m not completely sure. The bus ride took 20–25 minutes and cost 6 złoty each.

We had booked the 9:00 am tour, but in our typical fashion we arrived over an hour early, so we filled in time wandering through the main town square first. We then went to the mine entrance and exchanged our tickets for the 8:30 am tour instead. Tours run every 30 minutes with a maximum group size of 30 people, and each group is in a specific language. There can be up to eight groups (i.e., eight different languages) at once, but they leave a few minutes apart. It wasn’t very busy today—only three or four groups when we started. Our English group went in first, following our guide, Anetta. Everyone had a headset to make sure we could hear her clearly.

We began by descending 380 steps, heading down 40 levels to 64 m below ground. By the end of the tour, we were told we’d have descended 800 steps in total. Thankfully, there’s an elevator to come back up! As you go down the square stairwell, markers on the wall show each level. Anetta led us down quite quickly.

From there, we walked through a series of chambers connected by tunnels—pretty much what you’d expect in a mine. Some are lined with timber beams, while others are cut directly through the salt. In each chamber, Anetta stopped to share history and information about the mine. Here are a few basic stats:

Total depth: 327 meters (1,073 ft)

Total length of passages: 245 km (152 miles)

Levels: 9

Tourist route length: 3.5 km (2.2 miles)

Tourist route depth: 135 metres

Underground temperature: 14–16°C (57–61°F)

Most chambers contain sculptures of historical figures associated with the mine, all carved from salt. You can’t touch them, as moisture from skin would slowly dissolve them. There are also displays showing how the mine operated—carts, winches, horses, men, railways, pulleys, and so on. It’s all very interesting. Each chamber is dated to when it was first created, some going back as early as the 13th century. Active commercial mining stopped in 1996. In 1978, the mine was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

At the lowest point, there are two massive chambers. They’re hard to describe properly, but imagine the size of a ballroom or the inside of a big church. There are also large chambers containing shallow lakes—not of fresh water, but brine. A few photos below might help fill in the blanks, but “amazing” was Sarah’s word for it all. Almost everything in the large chamber was made from salt including the crystals in the chandeliers. The guided part of the tour lasted about two hours, followed by another 30 minutes of walking to reach the elevator. The ride up was very fast—nine people packed into each elevator “cage,” with four cages stacked on top of each other rising at once.

There was a lot of walking in the tour and yet the guide told us we only saw about 1% of the mine. You wouldn't want to get lost down there!

Afterward, we walked back to the main square and stopped at a bakery we had noticed earlier. It was after 11:00 am and I was hungry. 😂 We had a pizza-style pastry, another pastry, and a coffee each, enjoyed while sitting in the square. Very nice. On the way back to the bus, we also picked up a couple of geocaches.

Back in Kraków, there was no need for lunch—just a snack later. Sarah was feeling shattered from all the walking this week, so she went for a siesta while I mucked around on the laptop.

Around 4:00 pm, we started our afternoon “activity”: putting dye through Sarah’s hair, something my sister normally does for her. Today I was the super-sub. We had bought the hair dye back in Olomouc but hadn’t found any newspaper to protect the floor, so we hadn’t used it until now. This bathroom seemed the best option, with its smooth marble surfaces. We lined an area of the floor with cardboard from an old shoe box we found in a cupboard here and the large sheets of tissue paper inside it. We didn’t want to wreck the towels or damage the floor. More paper towels went around Sarah’s neck, and I completely stripped off to avoid getting my clothes damaged. Sorry—no photos were taken of this process for obvious reasons! We’ll see in the next few hours how good a job I did. 🤞

Dinner tonight was one of our go-to holiday meals: nachos!