Visiting Cardona Salt Mine, Museum & castle By Bus
Former salt mine active till 1990. Now open for guided tours and mine museum. Medieval 9th Century castle and luxury hotel. Once used to store the salt.
Updated: Dec 23, 2023by: Barcelona Travel HacksViews: 1.4k
About Cardona Salt Mine And Castle By Bus
Cardona is a town in the Spanish region of Catalonia about 90km north west of Barcelona and about 30Km north west of Manresa. Cardona was a stragecially important town in Catalonia providing Potasium chloride (salt) for medicines, food preservation, fertilizer and industrial processes.
This page is about a day trip or weekend visit to Cardona to discover the Caslte, salt mines and medieval town centre.
Cardona Salt mine and Castle History
Cardona has a great mountain of pure salt that grows as it is extracted. This is how Aulus Gellius (Roman Author) described the Cardona salt Mountain. It has always been one of the most important potassium salt mines in the world. La mina de Sal, Cardona, is loaced in a depression of land shaped like a long bowl and covers an area of 100 hectares. It has been exploited as an open mine since the Neolithic era, and from 1900 to 1990 through tunneling extraction, following the discovery of potassium salts by the engineer Emili Viader i Sole. Locally the salt mountain is known as Muntanya de Sal and the mines are refered to as mina nieves - snow mines because of the white desposits of salt crystals in all the rocks.
Cardona Castle has dominated the highest point in the town since the 9th century, an ideal location for controlling the valley of the river Cardoner and the salt mines. Between the 11th and 15th centuries it was the residence of the lords of Cardona, but its importance as a residence gradually declined as it became, a strategic stronghold to protect the salt. In 1714, the castle of Cardona was the last fortress to surrender to the Bourbon troops in 1714, during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Construction of the imposing Castle started two thousand five hundred years ago. During the Middle Ages it was home to the Dukes of Cardona. Centuries and centuries of history lie behind this unbreachable fortress, which is also site of the remarkable Collegiate Church of Sant Vicenc, a jewel of Catalan Romanesque gothic architecture.
It was because of the salt (white gold!) that the Lords of Cardona were known as the Kings without a Crown.
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