Dig a little deeper and you'll find a real gem: France's other Louvre

I'll tell you what else is daylight robbery, though - some of the ticket prices to get into art galleries! Visiting the Met or MoMA in New York will cost you US$30 each ($45), while the Uffizi in Florence is even higher, at 29 euros ($51). It makes the Louvre, at 22 euros ($38), seem quite reasonable, especially considering the size of its collection.

But you want a real steal? How about the Louvre's other French art gallery ... which has free entry (no ladders or power tools required). If you've not heard of it before, that's not a huge surprise, because it's in the most unlikely of locations.

The Louvre has just two satellite galleries. One, that people may know about, is in Abu Dhabi. The other is in a small historic French mining town called Lens, about 200 kilometres north of Paris near the border with Belgium. Opened in 2012, the Louvre-Lens displays items on loan from the main institution, with at least 200 pieces in the free public gallery at any time.

It's not just what's on display that's interesting, it's also how it's displayed. Entering the main part of the gallery, I'm struck first by the size of the enormous space, more than 120 metres long. Along the entire length of one wall is a timeline of 5000 years of human history, and as you walk through the room, the pieces you're seeing correspond to the era on the wall. And while the length of the room represents time, the width represents space, or geography. Veer to the left or the right as you walk along, and you'll move between continents. Incroyable!

The Louvre-Lens was established by the French government as part of a campaign to spread the country's cultural treasures beyond Paris. Lens was chosen in particular because it was hoped it would have a secondary effect - rejuvenating a former mining region devastated by both World Wars and the closure of the mines. (The museum is even built on an old coal pit.)

Known as the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, this area once supplied half of France's coal, helping to power centuries of industrialisation in Europe. Much of the infrastructure from that time still remains - and you might think it would create unsightly blemishes across the landscape, scars from a dark gritty era. But actually ... the opposite has occurred.

Just like the pieces in the Louvre-Lens that represent a particular time and place in history, dozens of important locations from the history of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin have been protected as part of a World Heritage Site. And when you look at them in this context, they take on a certain beauty. Dare I say it, they're almost pieces of art.

I never imagined I would be impressed by a slag heap, but here I am standing at the top of one, heaping praise on it. In the town of Haillicourt, there are two of them known as Les Terrils du Pays à Part, each 180 metres high, huge piles of mining waste looming like blackened pyramids. Yet when you're up close, following the paths that lead to the top or perhaps on one of the guided tours, you'll find greenery growing from the soil, attracting animals, creating a whole new ecosystem. Another nearby heap even has a vineyard on its slope.

To get a sense of some of the work that took place in the region, I visit the town of Oignies and its coal pit called 9-9bis, where almost 5 million tonnes was extracted in the mid-1900s. Now, hulking metal structures still protrude from the quaint red-brick buildings, connected by dark metallic pipes, a strange juxtaposition that is part of the site's beauty.

Interestingly, you can join a guided tour to go inside some of these buildings, where much of the machinery is still in place. An association of history buffs and former miners keeps the equipment in good condition and some of it can still be turned on... as I discover when a cacophony of screeching metal and pumping pistons suddenly fires up.

To accommodate all the workers, companies built mining towns across the region. One of the most interesting is the City of Electricians, founded in the 1850s. It's the oldest in the region... and I think also the most elegant, with ochre bricks, deep green doors and white trims painted around the windows.

A modern building in the town has interesting interactive displays about the development of mining towns from social and architectural perspectives. To learn even more, I suggest also going into a row of original houses that have been connected internally to create a great museum about life here for the residents and their place in the broader landscape.

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But probably the best museum in the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, a good place to either start or finish a trip, is the Mining History Centre in Lewarde. On the site of the old Delloye colliery yard that once stretched out over eight hectares, the exhibitions tell the story of what it was like to be a coal miner here.

You'll see some of the original facilities like the lamp room, machinery, and bathrooms with innovative clothes hangers. But the highlight is going down into an old mining tunnel to trace the development of the industry from the dangerous days when everything was done by hand, through to the more recent mechanised era.

The Mining History Centre is perhaps not a museum that French thieves would target, but it still has plenty of jewels on display. The fact that the region's industrial heritage has been protected shows its value. Now accessible for everyone, what's mine is yours.