H and took a summer’s end quick excursion to the dammed Saale river valley to tour the landscape that developed around the reservoirs (Stauseen) and how the natural intersects the artificial.
First we stopped to take a guided tour of the Saalfeld Fairy Grottos (die Feengrotten), a set of caverns in a former mine for alum shale (see previously) remarkable for their colourful mineral veins, called speleothems, owing to the porous soil.
Commercial operations halted in 1850 (the use of potassium aluminate as a preservative was antiquated) and was opened to tourist as early as 1914 due to the reputedly curative properties of the ambient radiation present, after the discovery of the third chamber, the Märchendom—the Fairy Tale Kingdom and the Grail Castle after various interpretations of the sedimentary creations.
Seeing this tableau inspired Siegfried Wagner to pattern the set design for his father’s opera Tannhäuser for the Bayreuth Festspiele in the 1920s.
