The city built on salt

Lüneburg is a town in Lower Saxony. It lies about 50 kilometres southeast of Hamburg and has a population of around 76,000. Nearby is the Lüneburg Heath Nature Park, which attracts many visitors every year. Lüneburg’s skyline is dominated by the towers of St. John’s Church, St. Nicholas’ Church, St. Michael’s Church and the water tower. The town’s central square is called “Am Sande”.

Lüneburg lies on the Ilmenau, a small tributary of the Elbe. The town has a former harbor, whose landmark is still the wooden “Old Crane.” In the past, this crane was used to load and unload ships carrying an important raw material along the Ilmenau and the Elbe: salt. It was mined in Lüneburg and shipped mainly to Lübeck, where it was then sold on.

In the Middle Ages, both cities belonged to the Hanseatic League. That is why they still call themselves Hanseatic cities today. Salt and trade with other Hanseatic cities made them wealthy.

Salt production in Lüneburg began about 1,000 years ago. Today, only a little salt is produced. But many magnificent old buildings still remain, including the town hall, whose oldest parts date back to 1230.

In Lüneburg, people like to tell the story of a wild boar that hunters found asleep in a forest long ago. The animal looked strange: it was covered all over in little white grains.

The hunters killed the pig and discovered that the little grains tasted salty. They followed the animal’s tracks back and found a pool where it had recently been wallowing. The water in the pool was very salty, and countless grains of salt had become caught in the animal’s fur. When its fur dried, the grains became visible.

Did this story really happen this way? In Lüneburg, at any rate, a bone said to have come from the salt sow is kept. It is proudly shown to visitors to the city at the town hall. One thing is certain: beneath Lüneburg lies a massive salt deposit. This is a layer of salt deep underground.

For more than 1,000 years, the people of Lüneburg knew how to dissolve the salt beneath their feet and bring the brine to the surface. They boiled the water in boiling huts and pans until it evaporated. Valuable salt was left behind, which they could sell for a high price.

People cannot live without salt. The body of a man weighing about 75 kilograms contains around 250 grams of salt; that of a newborn baby contains about 14 grams. One litre of human blood contains nine grams of dissolved table salt. Salt regulates the amount of fluids and minerals in our bodies.

Without salt, our nerves, muscles and digestion would not function properly. Salt is an important component of blood and helps build bones. The body loses salt when we sweat, cry or go to the toilet. That is why everyone needs to consume about six grams of salt a day. Salt can also be used to preserve food, such as meat or fish. This was especially important in the past, when there were no refrigerators or freezers.

Salt has always been valuable. In some cultures, officials and soldiers were paid in salt. The Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians used it as a seasoning, a preservative and for mummifying the dead. In the countries around the Mediterranean, salt was obtained either from seawater or from deposits in salt deserts. In northern Europe, people used salt found underground.

About 260 million years ago, what is now northern Germany was covered by a shallow sea. It was much warmer than it is today. The water in this sea evaporated, and land emerged, only to be flooded again at some point. The water evaporated again, and the whole process repeated itself. This cycle continued for about 10 million years.

But each time, the heavy, solid materials in the water were left behind. Layers of limestone, gypsum and salt formed. Eventually, these layers were up to 3,000 metres thick. Later, other deposits covered them. The Earth’s crust is always moving, but each movement takes a very, very long time. Over time, the salt layers formed salt domes and ridges that rose almost to the surface in some places. Salt deposits like these can be found in many parts of northern Europe. One formed beneath what is now the city of Lüneburg. Another result of these constant changes in the Earth’s crust can be found here: Kalkberg. It is made of gypsum rock, which was forced upwards over millions of years and used in Lüneburg to build houses.

A saltworks is a facility for producing salt. More than 1,000 years ago, a saltworks was built above the salt deposit beneath what is now the city of Lüneburg. It was once surrounded by thick walls and tall towers. At the saltworks, water was sent underground. It dissolved the salt, forming a watery solution called brine.

At the centre of the saltworks was the salt well, where brine was first brought up from underground in buckets, and later pumped to the surface. This salt well was called a “Sod”.

Six workers, known as “Zuckenschläger”, operated the pump’s lever. The Obersegger, or foreman, had a place beside the pump. The Sodmeister was responsible for distributing the brine. From here, it flowed through wooden channels to the boiling houses. Fifty-four boiling houses, named after their owners, were grouped around the salt well.

Each hut had four boiling pans, making a total of 216 boiling pans at the Lüneburg Saltworks. Large quantities of wood needed to heat the pans were stored beside the huts. The site also had a customs booth and a salt booth, where salt was sold in small quantities.

The brine was carried from the salt well to the boiling houses. Under each house was a large brine tank called a “ship.” The “Sülzer” drew the brine from it and poured it into the boiling pans, which were made of hammered lead. Clay ovens beneath the pans were heated with wood. The heat evaporated the water in the pans, leaving the salt behind. About 17 kilograms of salt were produced from 50 litres of brine. In the Middle Ages, all the salt houses in Lüneburg together produced around 20,000 tonnes a year.

Work in the boiling huts went on around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were two shifts a day: 11 hours at night and 13 hours during the day.

Around 300 people worked at the Lüneburg saltworks in the Middle Ages, including children who had to keep the fires burning in the clay furnaces. Smoking was not allowed on the job, and dogs were not allowed on the premises.

In 1465, Pope Paul II allowed the owners of Lüneburg’s salt works to boil salt even on major holidays such as Christmas and Easter. In the end, only Good Friday remained a day off work.

The “Sülfmeistertage” festival is still held in Lüneburg every year. It commemorates the people who operated the boiling pans and helped make the city prosperous.

The Sülfmeister were not owners, but lessees of the salt-boiling houses. The owners were the “Sülzbegüterten”: members of the nobility, clergy and wealthy citizens. They did not work themselves, but leased the boiling pans to the Sülfmeister. No one could lease more than two salt-boiling houses. The Sülfmeister had to hand over half of their yield to the owners, who paid taxes to the Lüneburg city council.

Some families became very wealthy thanks to salt. They had magnificent houses built, which still shape the cityscape of Lüneburg today.

The labourers’ work in the boiling houses was hard, and the pay was low. The air inside was hot and humid, so they often worked naked. They wore a linen smock with a hood only when loading the salt. The lead in the boiling pans made people ill. But there was no cure for this or many other diseases. As a result, few people lived past the age of 35 to 40.

The route to Lübeck was especially important for the salt trade. A lot of salt was needed there, for example, to preserve herring caught in the Baltic Sea. It took a whole barrel of salt to preserve five barrels of herring.

Until the 18th century, more than half of the salt from Lüneburg was transported to Lübeck. There, it was either processed directly or shipped across the sea to other Hanseatic cities.

Salt was transported from Lüneburg by horse-drawn wagons along the Salt Road, or by ship via the Ilmenau, the Elbe and the Stecknitz Canal. This was a forerunner of today’s Elbe–Lübeck Canal. It took up to four weeks for a shipment to reach Lübeck.

The Old Harbor is still located at Am Stint, a former marketplace in Lüneburg. Salt was loaded onto ships here using a wooden crane, which was also used to unload the wood needed in the salt-boiling huts. The crane dates back to 1797. It had several predecessors.

Eventually, the ships grew larger and more powerful. Before long, they were bringing salt from the Atlantic coasts of France, Spain and Portugal to western and northern Europe. It was lower quality than Lüneburg salt, but it was cheaper.

The importance of the Hanseatic League also continued to decline. The Thirty Years’ War and the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries had a devastating impact. There were occasional periods of recovery, but eventually salt production was no longer worthwhile. Today, only small amounts of brine are needed in Lüneburg to operate a spa. The saltworks finally closed in 1980.

Salt mining once brought wealth to the city, but today it faces consequences no one could have foreseen in the Middle Ages: in some places, the ground above the salt dome is giving way and subsiding.

The subsidence is caused by cavities created when the brine was pumped out. In recent decades, the ground in Frommestraße has sunk by more than 2 metres in places. The road surface has cracked, and the posts of a former garden gate have shifted. Locals in Lüneburg now call it the “Gateway to the Underworld”.

The area is surveyed repeatedly. In recent years, some houses have already had to be demolished, while others have been reinforced with elaborate and costly structures. Some of the columns in St. Michael’s Church are now noticeably crooked.

The problem is not new: Two churches, St. Mary’s Church and St. Lambert’s Church, as well as several houses on the salt dome near the saltworks, had to be demolished as long ago as the 19th century.