The Saltworks and the Salt Museum - Salins-les-Bains

For more than a thousand years, the town of Salins-les-Bains has owed its prosperity to the production and sale of salt. Today, the Salt Museum and the saltworks known as the “Grande Salines” offer us a unique testimony to salt production in Franche-Comté. The tour begins in the monumental underground galeries. They connect two wells which are equipped with a pumping system still in working condition today and which pumps salt water up through a vein of rock salt found 200 metres below the surface. Continuing the tour, the visitor then arrives in the “boiler room” where water was heated so as to extract the salt after evaporation. The tour continues in the Salt Museum and in an area devoted to the younger public. With its up-to-date facilities, the Salt Museum also shows films and a collection of technical objects that help us to better understand the thousand-year dimension of the Comtois salt industry. In addition, the “Grande Saline” of Salins-les-Bains is closely connected to its sister site at Arc-et-Senans via a saltwater aqueduct 21 kilometres long, built in the 18th century to carry saltwater to the new royal saltworks. Together on June 27th 2009, the two saltworks were declared UNESCO World Heritage sites.