Hallstatt salt mines and the Hallstatt culture

Miners have dug salt inside the mountain above Lake Hallstatt for more than 3,000 years. Their wealth filled a high-valley cemetery of over a thousand graves, excavated from 1846, whose bronze and iron goods gave the early Iron Age of central Europe its name. Salt has preserved Bronze Age tools, clothing and a wooden staircase in the tunnels. Celts also mined at Dürrnberg near Hallein.