Sala

Sala owes its importance to the silver-bearing rock of Västmanland. For centuries miners worked the deposits at Salberget, where a village grew beside the mine. Silver brought the crown a valuable source of revenue, but extracting it required shafts, furnaces and an elaborate system to remove water from the workings.

In 1624 Gustav II Adolf founded a new town some distance from the mine and ordered the old mining village emptied. Georg Grissbach, brought from the Harz, took charge of improving the workings in 1628. A canal completed in 1640 supplied water power for machinery, and new shafts reached rich ore at greater depth. The great shaft named for Queen Christina was begun in 1650; after more than a decade of sinking it reached deposits some 190 metres below the surface. The mining landscape depended on dams and channels as well as the labour of miners and those who supplied fuel.

In 1736 fire destroyed almost all of Sala, including its church and town hall. Reconstruction took years, while the mine itself faced the difficulties of declining production. Miners increasingly used gunpowder alongside the older method of heating and breaking the rock, and the works continued to search for ore at different levels. Nevertheless its shafts and waterworks remained a striking testament to the resources and effort devoted to Swedish silver.