Zipaquirá Salt Cathedral Window Display — The Gift Shop

The further you walk into the Salt Cathedral, the more you realise—far beyond expectation—just how vast this underground world truly is. The cathedral alone is astonishing, yet inside, a string of souvenir shops appears one after another, with spaces that seem to lead on to a restaurant and even what looks like a performance hall.

And I found myself wondering:
‘In a cathedral this deep underground, why would all these facilities be necessary?’

Souvenir Shop at the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá

The walls and ceiling of the salt cavern hold a kind of reverence—and yet, threaded right through that reverence, there are unmistakable tourist facilities. In a resting area connected to the cathedral, there is even a “180-metre café”. As the name suggests, drinking coffee at around 180 metres below ground is, without doubt, a special experience.

But the moment I saw the price list, I realised it was even more expensive than Myeongdong in Seoul. Coffee in Colombia—the country of coffee—served deep underground. On the one hand, it felt intriguing: “an experience you can only have here.” On the other, it was also the moment when the boundary began to blur—was this a sacred Catholic site, or an enormous tourist complex?

Souvenir Shop at the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá

From a Pilgrimage of Prayer to an Exit of Consumption

What unsettled me most, however, was meeting those glittering products immediately after passing through the darkness of the Stations of the Cross. The Christian solemnity of a moment ago turned, in an instant, into the brightness of a marketplace. In a place where silence and repentance might naturally continue, people’s eyes suddenly drifted towards price tags and shop windows.

Who designed this route, and with what intention?

 

A “pilgrimage of prayer” flowing seamlessly into an “exit of consumption”—within that structure, where can our hearts truly remain?

And perhaps the most interesting part was this: my own heart was standing right on that boundary as well. No one in our group bought anything—not gold, not even a single lump of salt… and yet, on the way out, the thought brushed past me: “Should I have bought just a small piece of salt as a keepsake?”

Not buying, and feeling calm about it—then not buying, and feeling a flicker of regret. Isn’t that double-mindedness one of the most honest traces a journey leaves behind?

 

Unexpectedly, even the toilets in this underground world were extremely well maintained—and remarkably clean. To keep a space like that in such condition, deep inside a cavern, was oddly impressive. In a way, it was a scene that quietly revealed the truth: this place is not only a “cathedral”, but also a “large-scale operating system”.

Sacredness and commerce, silence and tourism, repentance and souvenirs—the underground route of the Salt Cathedral strings them all together on a single line. Walking that path, you find a complicated heart in which awe and doubt, admiration and unease, can exist at the same time. Perhaps it is precisely because of that inner wavering that this place has become a “modern pilgrimage site”.

 

The full story of the Salt Cathedral continues in the post below.
The Cathedral Made of 700-Million-Year-Old Salt: https://stella-mum.tistory.com/303

 

On a pilgrimage path towards my mother, now a star
– Little Star

 

 

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