COLOMBIA’S SALT MINE TURNED INTO A CHURCH

August 21, 2017 SouthAmerica

A short ways north of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, is the presently no longer producing salt mine of Zipaquirá, lying just outside of the small historic town with the same name. This underground salt mine worked for many years. It is unusual for South America, in fact, it is one of the few mechanized larger scale salt mines. Also in the region are the closed underground salt mines of Nemocón, Upín, and Sequilé. Countries like Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile have large salars, or salt lakes, from which to extract their ionic chloride bound cations. The saline springs and salt deposits around Zipaquirá had pre-Colombian extraction, Colonial Spanish exploitation, and production still in limited quantities that was described by Alexander Von Humboldt during his reconnaissance of Colombia. Significant modern mining methods by room and pillar method began in the twentieth century and then the mine closed in late 70s. In 1970, McLaughlin, a geologist working for the United States Geological Survey, gave an estimated geological resource at Zipaquirá that amounted to 130 million tonnes of salt. The total amount of salt produced from the mine is information that is not easily recovered, if it is available at all.

https://www.southamericatotheworld.com/ — Zipaquira asymmetric tails around clast

McLaughlin made a geological cross section of the salt deposit showing how the material is situated at the crest of anticline, a large fold in the Cretaceous aged formation. The section immediately conveys to the structural geologists that thickening of the salt must have occurred during formation of the fold, and is also evident in the way the salt layer tapers along the flanks of the folds. The highly banded halite in the mine marks plastic flow of the salt; this is seen by distinct pressure shadows that have filled by salt adjacent to transported clasts of black argillite.

Now that we have covered a bit about what the mine was, let us now consider how it is presented to the public today in underground tours to visit the mined out room turned into a chapel. It is rather photogenic, in a Disco Jesus style, the room illuminated in various dramatic lights, which serves to disguise the nature of the salt deposits. In fact, you will find little mention in the guided tours about the geology or the mining, and you will get plenty of Catholic antidotes that have nothing do with the reality of the material through which men once extracted salt. There are many crosses set up with lights at the various entrances to mined-out rooms. The Zipaquirá salt cathedral is a modern example of the world viewed through a haze of misdirection to outright fictional fabrications, and the masses of people moving along in the guided herds follow the tale, agreeing within their limited belief structure, not questioning anything significant, and really not understanding the nature of the physical world that they are seeing. The people and the tour operators are blinder than an underground miner with an extinguished lamp. If when confronted with extraordinary conditions, we humans mask the truth through omission, colorful light shows, and imaginative tales, then what does that say about everybody on everyday how our mental dialogues separate us from the reality of the universe?

The Zipaquirá salt mine is very much worth the time to visit and more so if one comes prepared to see what it really is- a salt mine.