Saline-les-Bains blows your mind, because it shows you an aspect of medieval history that you probably had no idea about. Or at least, that I had no idea before I visited it. Over a thousand years ago people discovered that the water flowing up from underground springs was salty. So even as far back as 1115 they created “saltworks” to collect the water, dry it, to obtain salt. One interesting learning for me was: there are huge underground salt deposits, but at a depth of over 250 meters, which means they were unreachable for miners at the time. Saline-les-Bains is in the middle of a valley with huge hills on both sides, so it is this Artesian well action that forces groundwater up through the salt layer.
