Zipaquirá Salt Cathedral: A Ceremony 180 Metres Underground in a Church Carved From an Active Salt Mine

Zipaquirá is a colonial mining town fifty kilometres north of Bogotá in the Cundinamarca highlands, and it is where the most unusual ceremony location I photograph in Colombia exists: the Salt Cathedral, an underground Roman Catholic cathedral carved entirely within a working salt mine at 180 metres below the surface of the Zipaquirá mountain. The cathedral is not a ruin or a historical site. It holds services. The cross in the main nave is fifteen metres tall and carved from the salt rock wall of the mine. The light is artificial and dramatic, installed to make the underground space legible and photographically deliberate. A ceremony in the Salt Cathedral is in an environment that is simultaneously a working mine, a functioning church, and one of the most architecturally extraordinary underground spaces in the world.

The Cathedral

The current Salt Cathedral was completed in 1995, replacing an earlier version from the 1950s that was closed for safety reasons. The entrance is through a tunnel that descends from the surface of the hill, passing through the Stations of the Cross carved into the mine walls before arriving at the main nave. The nave is fourteen metres wide, twenty-three metres tall, and seventy-five metres long, all carved from the halite salt rock of the Zipaquirá deposit that has been mined here since pre-Columbian times. The halite walls have a specific grey-white translucent quality that the installed lighting illuminates from below, giving the impression that the walls themselves are glowing.

The ceremony in the main nave is a ceremony inside a mountain. The ambient sound is different from any surface location: the acoustics of the carved rock give an echo and resonance that outdoor and standard indoor ceremonies do not have. The temperature underground is a consistent 14 degrees Celsius regardless of the surface temperature, which makes the Salt Cathedral appropriate year-round and requires planning the ceremony clothing accordingly.

Photography Inside the Mine

Photography in the Salt Cathedral requires adapting to conditions that differ from any other ceremony location I shoot. No natural light enters the mine. The installed lighting is blue-white LED, positioned to illuminate the carved surfaces rather than to be portrait-flattering. I work with off-camera flash positioned to supplement the ambient light without competing with the installed blue-white tones, which means the portraits from the Salt Cathedral have a specific cool-ambient warm-supplemental colour balance that is recognisable as underground in a way that cannot be replicated on the surface. The long exposures that the low ambient light requires give images where the salt walls read as slightly luminous and the couple appears as the warmest element in the frame.

Access and Planning

The Salt Cathedral charges an entrance fee and requires advance ticket purchase on peak days. It is open daily and the quietest time is early morning on weekdays. The ceremony access requires prior arrangement with the cathedral administration, which is the Diocese of Zipaquirá; personal ceremonies have been conducted there and the process for arranging one is through the cathedral office directly. The town of Zipaquirá outside the mine has its own colonial central square worth photographing before or after the underground session, giving a day that combines the colonial surface town with the underground cathedral in two genuinely different environments fifty metres apart vertically.