Salins-les-Bains lies at the bottom of a deep, narrow valley in the Jura, squeezed between two forested ridges, each crowned by a fort, and its wealth for most of history came from beneath its streets. Deep underground, salty water flows through layers of rock salt, and for over a thousand years the people of Salins pumped it up and boiled it in great pans to make salt, a precious commodity before refrigeration, used to preserve food and taxed heavily by the crown. The Grande Saline, the great saltworks, is now a museum, and you can walk through its underground galleries, where a huge hydraulic wheel and pump from the nineteenth century still turn, lifting brine from the depths.
By the eighteenth century, the forests around Salins were exhausted from feeding the fires under the salt pans. The solution was to bring the brine to the wood instead: a pipeline, made of hollowed tree trunks, carried the brine some twenty kilometres through the valley to Arc-et-Senans, on the edge of the great forest of Chaux, where the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built the Royal Saltworks in the 1770s, a semicircular complex designed as an ideal industrial city. Arc-et-Senans was listed by UNESCO in 1982, and Salins was added in 2009, linked by their shared history and the pipeline.
The riding around Salins is superb. The roads climb out of the valley in steep, twisting stretches onto the Jura plateaus, with forests, meadows, small villages and wide views, and continue south towards Champagnole and the lakes, or east into the higher Jura towards Switzerland. The surfaces are generally good, traffic light, and the scenery changes with every bend. Watch for cows on the road, logging trucks and, in winter, ice and snow.
Arbois, a few kilometres to the southwest, is the wine capital of the Jura and the town where Louis Pasteur grew up; his house is a museum. The Jura produces unusual wines, notably the nutty vin jaune, aged under a film of yeast for over six years. Comté cheese is the other local treasure, made in village dairies called fruitières. Salins itself can supply petrol and lunch; for a larger choice, Champagnole, twenty-two kilometres away, has everything. Try poulet au vin jaune with morels.