Creating Tourism Destinations of Underground Built Heritage—The Cases of Salt Mines in Poland, Portugal, and Romania

Abstract

Salt mines, a significant category of local, regional, national, and/or European underground heritage, are becoming attractive tourism destinations. This paper examines three cases of salt mining in different European countries, namely Wieliczka in Poland, Campina de Cima in Portugal, and Turda in Romania. They are analyzed in the context of history, typical attributes of their attractiveness, and new uses after the salt extraction was or is going to be stopped, in order to detect their unique values as important assets for both Underground Built Heritage (UBH) and Salt Heritage Tourism (SHT). The results of their comparison show that despite a positive impact related to their protection as cultural and industrial heritage, there are also some negative aspects related to increasing costs of their maintenance and adaptation of salt mines to new functions and to meet the tourism needs. By putting in place measures to enhance the awareness of their values and for activating the local community, the three mines are showcases for the economic outputs for their sites and regions, as well as for increasing knowledge regarding UBH.

Thinking Deep. Acting on Top. Underground Built Heritage and Its Fringe as a Community Catalyst for Local Sustainable Development: Exploratory Cases from Poland and Greece

“…Besides, heritage interpretation can play an important role in enhancing people's place attachment, awareness, understanding, and appreciation of time and place [99]. Next, even though the studied UBH complexes are of local importance, our results reveal they are also points of interest for tourists, and thus, our findings are in line with [100], which discussed UBH sites as examples of Heritage Tourism (HT).…”

Planning Perspectives and Approaches for Activating Underground Built Heritage

“…The author calls for producing evidence about the contribution of heritage to improve economic, social and environmental productivity. It is evident that local history linked to heritage and its social context is an effective way to enhance community interest and foster public participation in related plans and projects, such positive correlation has been also observed in other cases [34][35][36]. UBH with unique characteristics constitutes a significant part of heritage.…”

“…Embodying such "treasure" grants some unique dimensions of UBH and new values because it is not a familiar part of citizens' everyday life and therefore it attracts public interest. A growing interest in these novel and hidden assets is acknowledged [36,37] for learning, recreational and tourism purposes [34,38].…”

“…Through this lens, as some researchers propose [34,35,37,38], creativity is an important way to boost cultural tourism. In the end, creating a tourism destination is an attractive way to preserve UBH and to provide benefits to the community [1,36].…”

Evaluation of Technical Condition and Durability of Wooden Shaft Guides with Application of Non-Destructive and Semi-Destructive Testing Methods

“…To simultaneously handle thousands of tourists and mine operation (comprising the reconstruction and maintenance of historic workings and the liquidation of the others), three hoisting systems in three different shafts are used. Two of them are equipped with the wooden guidance of conveyances [ 28 ].…”