salt mine

American  

noun

1. a mine from which salt is excavated.

2. Usually salt mines. a place of habitual confinement and drudgery.

   After two weeks of vacation it will be back to the salt mines for the staff.

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Etymology

Origin of salt mine

First recorded in 1675–85

Example Sentences

The “Romeo and Juliet” director’s research team stumbled upon this unseen footage in an underground salt mine in Kansas while making the 2022 biopic starring Austin Butler.

From Los Angeles Times

The movie was stitched together from film hauled out of a storage facility—a former salt mine—in Kansas.

From The Wall Street Journal

Found by the Allies in the salt mine at Bad-Aussee, they were returned to Czech authorities at the end of the war, only to be appropriated by the state during the Communist era.

From The Wall Street Journal

That's also been placed in the Memory of Mankind repository, another vault safeguarding historic documents, hidden in a salt mine in Austria.

From BBC

Their bunker, an astonishingly constructed salt mine, has a house, individual rooms, a swimming pool, a fishery and just about anything else you’d need in the aftermath of an ecoapocalypse.

From Salon