An environment view is a directory structure mirroring a typical Linux root directory containing directories such as /bin, /usr, etc. These directories contains symlinks to the installed spack packages.
When we activate an environment, spack updates the current shell environment variables with these directories that makes spack packages, executables, libraries, and other files accessible.
If we activate an environment and look for the path for any executable, we can view the structure of the view as shown below.
[myenv] spack@28da34228d6b:~$ which python
/home/spack/myenv/.spack-env/view/bin/python
[myenv] spack@28da34228d6b:~$ tree -L 1 /home/spack/myenv/.spack-env/view/
/home/spack/myenv/.spack-env/view/
├── bin
├── etc
├── include
├── lib
├── lib64
├── libexec
├── man
├── pyvenv.cfg
├── sbin
└── share
10 directories, 1 file