Wieliczka, a gorgeous mine in a very old mining city!

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At around 20mn from Krakow, there is an old mining city, with an old mine of course! More precisely, a salt mine. It remains only few of them on the world, and even less that you can visit !

It's not really cheap, because it cost around 18€, but if you're student or under 25, it's 15€. The visit last between 2 and 3 hours.

They organize tours with guides who spoke differents languages, polish, english, french, spanish, german, even other ones.

The guide we had, spoke a very good french.

When you enter the building at the surface, it's small, and a lot of groups are here, it's kind of mess! But, if you just follow your guid, there's just no problem.

You go down around 400 steps to arrive at the first floor we can visit. There are 5 floors, and we can visit 3 of them.

There is a lot of models on each floors to show you the old way to do.

The mine never knew problem, like crumbling or other...That's why miners built churches, chapels, and sculpt dwarfs/leprechaun because they thought they were protecting them.

At around 100 meters down the surface, you have an old chapel with a lot of statues and scenes of the bible scultp in walls, and the altar. This chapel is still used for weddings, communion, etc...

There are artificial lakes, and they tried a light & sound show on one lake, it was great.

Until WWII, there was boats sailing on an artificial river. But in WWII, nazis were on a boat, and it returns. Because of the huge rate of salt in the water, they can't return the boat and died drown. So, from this accident, boats are stopped.

At the end of the visit, you can choose to go up or to visit the museum. It's free, the entrance is include in your ticket. When we came, we were about 20 french in the group, but only us visit the museum. It was interesting! The guide show you how they sculpt the salt before to sell it, and the different ways to do it. Also the directors from the last centuries, a model showing the differents floors laid on few kms each.

To go to Wieliczka, you have to take a bus, if I remember well, it's bus number 304, but I'm not sure. It's not a bus for the town, so it's not the same ticket that a Krakow ticket. You have to buy another one, it cost around 1€. From the Krakow center, you're in Wieliczka in 25mn, it's really close.

Hope you'll enjoy !

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