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Entrance to the mine (mid-April to mid-Oct daily 7.30am-7.30pm; mid-Oct to mid-April Tues-Sun 8am-4pm; 29zl; ) is by guided tour only, in groups of thirty or so. In summer English-language tours set off quite regularly; in winter you may have to follow a Polish-language tour. You can always buy the English-language guidebook available at the ticket office. Be prepared for a bit of a walk - the tour takes two hours, through nearly two miles of tunnels. A clanking lift takes you down in complete darkness to the first of the three levels included in the tour , at a depth of 65m (if you're unlucky, you may have to walk the whole way down to the bottom level and up again). The rooms and passageways here were hewn between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and whereas the lower sections are mechanized, horses are still partly used to pull things around on the top three levels. Many of the first-level chambers are pure green salt, including one dedicated to Copernicus, which he is supposed to have visited. The further you descend, the more spectacular and weird the chambers get. As well as underground lakes, carved chapels and rooms full of eerie crystalline shapes, the second level features a chamber full of jolly salt gnomes carved in the 1960s by the mineworkers. The star attraction, Blessed Kinga's Chapel , completed in the early part of the nineteenth century, comes on the bottom level, 135m down: everything in the ornate fifty-metre-long chapel is carved from salt, including the stairs, bannisters, altar and chandeliers. The chapel's acoustic properties - every word uttered near the altar is audible from the gallery - has led to its use as a concert venue, and even, of late, as a banquet hall, ex-US president George Bush Senior being one of the first to be feted with a feast in his honour in 1995, a token of thanks for his support for anti-pollution measures in the city. Recent events have included performances of Zbigniew Preisner's film scores for Kieslowski's internationally renowned Red, White and Blue trilogy. A museum , also down at the lowest level, documents the history of the mine, local geological formations, and famous visitors such as Goethe, Balzac and the emperor Franz Josef.
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