Although its salt is sometimes marketed as "Jurassic Sea Salt", this salt deposit comes from a seabed of the Permian and Cretaceous eras 100 to 200 million years ago. This sea became landlocked and evaporated, leaving a dense salt deposit, colored by a common pink microorganism that had lived in it. Salt was probably mined there from that time, but the first records of mining are from the Janjua people in the 1200s.

Himalayan salt is mostly mined at the Khewra Salt Mine in Khewra, Jhelum District, Punjab, which is situated in the foothills of the Salt Range hill system in the Punjab province of the Pakistan Indo-Gangetic Plain.