The white mountain you see from anywhere in Sallent (Bages, Catalonia) isn’t snow and isn’t a quarry. It’s leftovers.
It’s the runam salí del Cogulló, an artificial mountain made of waste from the potash mines. Potash goes mostly into fertiliser; separating it from the ore leaves huge amounts of ordinary salt, and that salt was simply piled up outdoors.
The Cogulló started growing in 1977, when the older heap, la Botjosa (about 4 million tonnes), was closed. Dumping stopped at the end of June 2019, with roughly 48-49 million tonnes of salt on it. It’s considered the biggest waste dump in Catalonia.
The catch is the rain: it dissolves the salt, and the brine seeps into the ground, the aquifers and the Llobregat river. La Botjosa now has drains that collect the brine and send it through a pipeline to the Mediterranean, and it’s the pilot for restoring the Cogulló. By 2021, progress on that was minimal.
A mountain of table salt. Seriously.