  We show that the masses of the lowest-lying heavy baryons can be very well
described in a pion mean-field approach. We consider a heavy baryon as a system
consisting of the $N_c-1$ light quarks that induce the pion mean field, and a
heavy quark as a static color source under the influence of this mean field. In
this approach we derive a number of \textit{model-independent} relations and
calculate the heavy baryon masses using those of the lowest-lying light baryons
as input. The results are in remarkable agreement with the experimental data.
In addition, the mass of the $\Omega_b^*$ baryon is predicted.
