The Salt Cathedral

The following weekend we went to the Salt Cathedral which is just outside of Bogota- it is literally a cathedral made inside a salt mine, hundreds of meters below the ground! The mines around the cathedral are still productive and inside the cathedral there are some salt deposites that people scrape salt off of as a souvenir. The mine itself is hundreds of years old, dating back to the Muisca period (700 AD) but the first cathedral was opening in 1954. That one is closed now though for safety reasons. The new cathedral, which is the one we were in was "built" in 1995. It is hard to appreciate how huge it is only looking at pictures but you can see on the first picture a pillar compared to us which might start to give you an idea. The cathedral itself can accomodate 8,400 people!! They hold mass in the cathedral a few times each day and the stations of the cross are built into it so its mostly a site for religious tourism.