To delve deeper into the art of salt workers and enjoy a landscape impossible on the other side of the border, we go to the Gruissan salt flats, a natural and industrial emblem of the Aude department, north of Girona.
Gruissan salt flats, a pink treasure by the sea
We may now see salt as something “negative” due to the excess of this ingredient in processed foods, but both its function as a food preservative and its incorporation into the diet were key to human progress.
Proof of this are the Gruissan salt mines that began to be exploited from the year 100 BC, an activity that would be developed this port town in “circulade”a type of typical circular rural structure of Languedoc.
But the industrial activity as we know it today that began to generate this iconic Aude landscape began in 1910: almost 400 hectares of land between the Ayrolle and Grazel ponds were granted to the salt works society of the island of Saint-Martin.
In 1970, up to thirty families exploited these salt flats following a ancient technique that explains Bernadette Marty, guide of the Gruissan salt flats: the sea, the wind and the sun are the “tools” for their work sauniers.
How is salt obtained in Gruissan?
Coastal salt pans take advantage of flat land at levels equal to or lower than sea level, generally marshes as is the case in Gruissan. Small walls of earth separate plots, establishing channels so that sea water reaches each piece of land. But since there are no tides in the Mediterranean, the water has to be “forced” to travel the path that takes it to the salt flats.
They say that the first salt mine in Gruissan, Paul Marty, used rails and horse-drawn wagons to transport salt: about five tons in 100 bags in the first harvest of 1913… 30,000 tons few years later.
It must be taken into account, in this sense, that one liter of water contains about 30 grams of salt. But for the salt to settle due to the combined action of the wind and the sun, a concentration of 260 grams per liter.
To do this, starting in March, when the annual harvest work begins, seawater is circulated and stored in each plot of land ranging in size from one to ten hectares, connected to each other by narrow passages that They were controlled by wooden valves.
Generally it is between July and August when, at the end of the water’s path (which can reach 40 kilometers totals if all sections are added), reaches its point of crystallization.
This is when the harvest process, which traditionally consisted of threshing, arrives, when the salt is removed and piled up in sheaves with conical shapesand of the lifting, when the salt is removed in carts. An expensive process in which entire families participated whose ultimate goal was the marketing of salt.
Since the 1960s, however, the process was mechanized, reducing the number of workers and incorporating threshing robots and locomotives that dragged the containers.
And why this pink appearance? It’s a totally natural tone, Marty recalls. When the water reaches its highest point of salt concentration, only one microalgae is able to survive: the Dunaliella salina.
Originally it is green, and it is the tone that we usually see in plots with lower saline concentration, but, to protect itself, it acquires this tone by producing carotenoids such as beta-carotene, something similar to what we already saw in Panjin (China) when we a tour of the colors of the world, although in this case it is algae suaeda heteroptera.
The renaissance of the Gruissan salt pans
In 2004, almost a century after the industrial exploitation of the Gruissan salt mines began, the company Salins du Midi, owner of them since 1968, closed due to lack of profitability. But then it came Patrice Gabanou“a saunier since he was six years old” who did not want to be defeated by the “globalization of the salt market.”
After months of litigation with the former owner who prevented him from resuming work in the salt flats, Gabanou got his way in 2010, first by opening a refining company, an oyster aquaculture farm, as well as an ecomuseum, a store and the restaurant La Cambuse du Saunierwhich has become quite famous over the years thanks to its location on the edge of the salt flats.
And after investing a million euros to rehabilitate the 40 km of canals that irrigate the basins, finally in 2011 the Gruissan salt flats they return to activitya good way to celebrate the century of history of this symbol of Aude’s industrial heritage.
More than a decade after the renaissance of the salt marshes, this pink treasure on the edge of the Mediterranean has become the main tourist attraction in Gruissan, a place where thousands of birds also come every year, including the flamingos that, thanks to feeding on algae such as Dunaliella salina They also acquire that iconic pink tone…
