Sambhar Salt Lake Tour

Overview

Sambhar Lake, situated in the Indian state of Rajasthan, is a place where horizons stretch to infinity, where water and sky merge in a shimmer of gauzy blue. Civilization here goes back a long, long time and legends abound. According to one reference in the epic Mahabharata, Raja Yayati, emperor of Bharatvarsh (India) and a descendant of Lord Brahma the Creator, married Devyani, daughter of Shukracharya (the guru of demons) who lived by the lake.

Sambhar quite literally means salt, and the various administrators of the area have extracted salt from here for over a thousand years. Over time, these have included the Sindhias, Rajputs, Marathas, Mughals and the rulers of Jaipur and Jodhpur who jointly owned the lake, and who in 1870 leased it to the British. After independence, the lake was taken over by the government and is now managed by Sambhar Salts Limited, a joint venture of Hindustan Salts and the Government of Rajasthan.

Sambhar is India's largest saline lake, 190 sq km in extent at full capacity, and lays some 60 km west of Jaipur, just outside prosaically named Salt Lake City. This vast body of glacial saline is on average just 0.6 cm deep and never more than 3 m even just after the monsoon. It stretches in length for 22.5 km, its width varying between 3 and 11 km. Several seasonal freshwater streams, two of the major ones being the rivers Mendha and Rupangarh, feed it.