Katharina Heigl

The Salt Saga: White Gold of the Alps

The "white gold" brought riches and wealth, technological innovation, migration, cultural exchange and early globalization, as early as 2,500 years ago. This ARTE documentary sheds some fascinating light on the history of the salt mine in Hallstatt. The life of the prehistoric people is resurrected in this documentary with lavish reenactments and animations. Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut in Upper Austria is one of the world's oldest and best documented industrial regions. Today, Hallstatt is a World Heritage Site. Salt has been extracted here in huge dimensions for about 7,000 years. For more than a hundred years, the world renowned archaeological site in Hallstatt, that gave its name to a whole age in European history, the early Iron Age, has been at the center of the research carried out at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.